Audacity Forum

Are you certain that you are using Audacity 2.4.2? Look in "Help menu > About Audacity" to check.
Where did you get Audacity from?

This one

richbedforduk wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 08, 2020 6:37 am

The Test Tone loads and plays, but the first FFmpeg message window does appear.

Which is "the first FFmpeg message window"?

The Test Tone loads and plays, but the first FFmpeg message window does appear.
The track has no parentheses or anything odd in the file name, see images.

Do the broken ones have parentheses in the filename?

Do the broken ones straighten up if you change the filename in Windows? Upper case, lower case, numbers, _underscore_ and -dash- only. No spaces.

Koz

In that case it would seem that there is something a bit peculiar about that MP3.
To confirm that, let's make sure that you are able to import a standards compliant MP3. Download this test tone and see if it will import. It's just a 10 second beep (it's quite loud):

Try I porting the file as raw data, I had the same issue and it seemed to fix it for me

Yes, so the location of the file is not the issue...

There's a few possibilities of where the problem lies.
Do you get the same error in Audacity if you move the file to your Desktop, and then import it from there?

And playing...