I’m on Win 7 and downloaded the .exe installer. Recently, all programs I’ve downloaded have hijacked my browser and slowed the pc down to a crawl.
Just need to ask, tho I’ve read the faq’s, how safe it is to click the “run” button… Any cautions we need to know etc?
Click the headphones on the top of this forum. Is that where you got your Audacity program from?
Which downloads slowed your computer and do you have up-to-date virus software?
Koz
Did you get it here: Audacity ® | Downloads
That is the official (genuine) download location.
There are many other places that you can download Audacity, but we have no way of knowing if they are “genuine” Audacity, so the recommendation is to download from the official source.
The world being as it is, even our carefully selected download providers need to advertise, so when you get to the download page there may be advertisements for other software that has nothing to do with us. Use a sensible amount of caution when downloading anything from the Internet.
A good way to test the authenticity of a downloaded file is a “checksum”. This is a (very clever) way of reducing any file to a unique number. There are several different ways to calculate a checksum, one of the most common is called the “MD5 checksum”. Unfortunately I don’t think that Windows provides a way to calculate the checksum of a file, but there are third party applications available, such as: winMD5Sum (direct link: nullriver software )
The MD5 checksum for audacity-win-2.0.5.exe is:
154b76b778b3f13b7662c824fbb64485
if you don’t want the trouble of testing checksums, just use the official download location and use common sense 
Yes that’s the link I used. I tied some file conversion programs and they all had other stuff therein.
Maybe yous can help. I put .wav files, using Win XP, onto a flash drive. Now Win 7 here won’t read it. They’ve converted to .dat files. So until I find a way to convert and backward format, I’ve lost all my music. Hence trying those programs but even if they worked there’s still WMP to deal with. Everything is so compatibility related today as to make everything a task, sometimes impossible.
Many of them contain spyware or viruses if you see them in a Google advertisement.
Exactly how did you put them on the flash drive? WAV files should be large - 30 MB for a stereo pop song. If the files are that size, try File > Import > Raw Data… in Audacity. You may be OK with the default settings or you may have to change them.
Do you know what application created the WAV files?
Gale
I put them on the usual way, drag and drop. The files, both music and video, I made in CoolEdit and Windows Movie Maker. They all had the same extension before; .wav.
Here’s a paste of the “name” of one file; {0cf9254a-321d-4a46-8ce2-b81619d0a461}
Do6h!
Most are small files as they are works in progress - vocals, short clips etc. This is years of work and if I can’t reconvert I may as well enlist for the Russian Front or something. Can’t believe they converted as this essentially makes the flash drive moot.
The number you give looks like a Checksum .
A video file should not have WAV extension.
Did you right-click Safely Remove Hardware in the system tray before you ejected the flash drive? If not the files may be corrupted.
Have you tried simply renaming these files to WAV extension instead of DAT?
Otherwise you will have to try Import Raw Audio as described. If you are stuck, post one of the files somewhere and give us the web address of the file, but we are not guaranteeing to solve the problem. It is not an Audacity problem.
Gale
The files looked all right when they left WinXP, right? They all had the proper filenames on the flash drive?
Did you have any trouble getting Win7 to show you file extensions? It doesn’t normally want to.
.dat files created a number of problems for us in email attachments. If one side of a transaction has Exchange Server and the other doesn’t, there can be some interesting cross-ups.
Koz
Did you have dates in your filenames?
Koz
Says to use Windows usual methods to close (before detaching, so I simply clicked the x I think). Not much involved but you may be right as these things are far too temperamental. File has a date but don’t see how that helps. I sent that same file to a local pc tech and am still waiting. It’s a Lexar Encrypt Stick AES. What really gets me is that this company says it can’t do anything to help. And yes, there are both vids and .wavs… which means those vid files are either avi or mpegs or whatever. All dat files now. I’m still debating on whether to run audacity. Quite the game here but appreciate the help.
If someone is up on this kinda thing maybe I could email you one of these files to see if you can get it back to normal? I’d gladly pay you of course.
That’s the key right there. The web pages for that device go on for pages about encrypting your work so if you lose the drive, nobody can ever see your work. So no, they will not be WAV and AVIs. They will probably be 256 AES encrypted data files.
Do you still have the instructions that came with it?
If I had to guess, you were intended to save your work so that nobody but the original machine could open them again. It’s not a standard, cheap USB thumb drive.
All this is informed guesswork since it comes in several different versions.
Koz
Isn’t the idea that you are supposed to use the “EncryptStick™ Lite” software to decrypt the file (when you provide your password)?
Gale
Well… I of course used the password to get back in. You however piqued my curiosity so tried from scratch… and for some reason, it opened; and files are integral. For some reason, trying the password, today, got my files back as originally stored. So I won’t have to endure Stalingrad etc… Danke.
So…
Now I’ve got my CoolEdit Sessions back. We’ll see if Audition can read these as the older version did. It’s seeing the files but isn’t placing them as I laid them out in cooledit’s multitrack.
But I’m so glad you chose to type that obvious but overlooked troubleshoot.
I am glad you can open your files but we can’t help with CoolEdit here.
Gale