enormous file crashes Audacity

Been using Audacity for a long time (love it). Weekly routine of recording and posting to my blog. I must have screwed up the recorder settings this week. what is normally a 40 meg MP3 (no problem for Audacity) is this week a 1.6 Gig MP3 (unbelievable!).

[Win 7, Audacity 2.0.1, I think I have the .exe but I’m not sure]

When I try to import it into Audacity like normal, it takes about 20 times longer than usual to upload (expected), and in the end I get “Audacity not responding”. I never get the graphic audio signal on screen. Import never completes.

Any ideas how to complete the Import or how to reduce the file size before importing?

Have you tried playing the MP3 to see if it actually works and what audio is in it?
(no point struggling if it’s corrupted or garbage)

What’s the recording/playing time? …Depending on the bitrate, that could be somewhere in the ballpark of 15 Hours. I guessing that’s not what you expect? Is it possible that you accidently recorded too long, or is it more likely the file is just totally corrupted?

Did you record that file with Audacity and export to MP3, or did it come from somewhere else?

The largest MP3 I have is an almost 4-hour concert MP3 that’s about 440MB. It takes 4-5 minutes to decompress, and then I get “Not Responding” for a couple of minutes before the waveform finally shows-up and everything is OK. (It starts playing immediately in Windows Media Player.)

DVDdoug, BINGO!! you guessed it. I feel pretty stupid. recorder says playing time is like 28 hours ! what an idiot.

Anyway, I recorded it in MP3 mode with my little Olympus pocket recorder. Then imported it into Audacity, or rather tried to. After about 30 minutes importing, Audacity crashes; “not responding”. If I could get it into Audacity I could cut it, obviously.

The audio I want to save runs from start to about the 40 min mark (out of 28h 7m 27s).

Any ideas how I can delete even say the last half of this MP3 file and keep the first half?

Try MP3Splt http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/mp3splt_page/home.php
An advantage of this application is that it can perform simple edits without decoding the MP3 first.

Steve, many thanks !! MP3Splt worked great. It took me awhile to figure out the DOS syntax. But you really bailed me out. I think I’ll make another donation to Audacity.