Having trouble importing long MP3 files

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hello.

I have installed Audacity today and I have no experience with it, and I am having trouble importing a ~2 hour long mp3 file. After I have imported it, idk what the program does to it but the end result is the file attached. Any help would be nice.

2

Can you play the file in Windows Media or any other music player?

How do you know it’s an MP3 file? Somebody said so, or do you have Windows file name extensions revealed? Audacity will open MP3 files just fine, but not other file types. Sometimes it will guess at an unknown file type which can sound like what you have.

Koz

3

I can play the file in the windows music player. And I have tried it with other mp3 files that I had laying around to check what’s wrong. Everything worked fine with shorter ones, but the same error with another 2 hour long file.

Well I said it is an MP3 file because it has that written in its properties and the name ends with an .mp3

4

Check the file with [u]MediaInfo[/u].

If it’s really an MP3 you should see this in the bottom section:
Audio
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3

And/or it can tell you what kind of file it is and there may be some other helpful information.

Or [u]MP3 Diags[/u] can diagnose, and often repair, MP3 files.

5

There can be magic with long compressed files. Audacity doesn’t edit MP3. It imports MP3 files, decompresses them to their original size and then saves them in the Audacity high quality format which is even larger. If you start to run out of drive space Audacity may not have enough space to do all that—and this problem would only affect longer files.

That a possibility?

Koz

6

Here is the result or mediainfo: https://mediaarea.net/MediaBin/xDnYwASl

I got this file on 17/11/2019 from converting a youtube video using some online website. The version and the profile seem to be wrong. I am now trying to see if mp3 diags can fix it.

7

I don’t think so. I have about 160 gb of free space and I think that should be enough.

8

So uh, it turned a 83 mb file into a 0kb file by removing the broken streams. I have made backup of it before trying to fix it. The website is probably the cause of all this.