Hi, thanks everyone for your willingness to help -
I use Audacity to open .wmv files and export as .mp3 in order to be able to use them in transcription software. And it works beautifully for files up to 30 minutes, sometimes up to 45 or so minutes -
but larger files do not open. For example, with this 47.6 MB, 49 min 16 sec .wmv file, Audacity opens nearly 35 minutes, then shows silence for the full length of the file. This has been a problem with all of the other, larger files I’ve been working with, although the precise minute mark where they crap out varies slightly.
No error message. I can export the file and get a 35 minute, truncated .mp3.
I’ve been googling this and found no trace of this problem. What the heck? Is there a way to fix it? To work around it, given that I need to have only one .mp3 per .wmv at the end, and the timestamps are important?
It’s not 47 MB. Windows Media files are or can be very highly compressed. When Audacity opens them, they explode to their real size – or bigger than that because Audacity works with files internally at a very high uncompressed quality. An hour stereo show could be over 700MB - 1GB.
Are you running out of room on your computer? How much hardware memory do you have?
Another option is to convert the file using another software package. Windows Media is a problem because Apple doesn’t admit the presence of Windows Media and Microsoft doesn’t admit the presence of QuickTime.
VLC Player might be useful. I think you can use that for export. I think you can still buy QuickTime Pro and that has exporting abilities and you can add Flip4Mac which knows how to speak Windows Media. That’s what we use at work when we have to speak all formats.
Thanks for the tips - VLC ended up being my best bet!
I think my computer has plenty of room, but the twist to this story is that on my computer QuickTime would also only play to the precise, 35 minute time, and my coworker tried to convert to .wav on her computer and only those same first 35 minutes converted. All the files Audacity has had trouble with were made by the same recorder… but I suppose this is a mystery for another forum.