New boy cannot play a WAV file

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

All I want to do is to crop the length of a WAV file. I use Windows 7 home version on a PC.

The WAV file is on my camera card. it has a short tile and simply .WAV The size is 3.84 Mb

Media player plays it straight away but Audacity would not recognise it and suggested to open it in RAW.

I successfully opened it in RAW but when I played it all I got was white noise.

I only downloaded Audacity to carry out this very simple task. Can someone please put me right? Many thanks. ( nothing over technical please)

2

I’m betting it’s not actually a WAV file. Windows likes to hide filename extensions, so unless you specifically changed a Windows setting, you should not see some_filename.wav. You would see it as some-filename. I would also be surprised if a camera recorded a WAV file.

You can extend Audacity’s abilities to open many other file types by adding the FFMpeg software.

http://audacityteam.org/download/windows

Koz

3

Just as a sidenote, some evil software developers get bad software on your Windows machine by calling the file harmless-music.mp3.exe. Windows obediently hides the .exe part (exe is a windows program, not sound) and all you see is harmless-music.mp3 The first time you try and play the music, it loads a virus on your machine.

Koz

4

it has a short tile and simply .WAV The size is 3.84 Mb

Just as sort-of a “sanity check”, A “CD quality” uncompressed WAV file (16-bit, 44.1kHz, stereo) of that size would have a playing time of about 1/2 a minute. A mono file at the same bit depth an sample rate would play for twice as long. If it plays much longer than that, it’s probably compressed (not a “standard” WAV).

Or, [u]MediaInfo[/u] can give you the format details for most audio/video files.

5

If you are 100% sure it is a WAV file then it may have a corrupt header which is preventing Audacity from playing it.

If it’s not a WAV file you may need to install something called FFmpeg into Audacity to play it …
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_installation_and_plug_ins.html#[u]How_do_I_download_and_install_the_FFmpeg_Import.2FExport_Library.[/u]3F

Then just drag-n-drop the file into Audacity.

6

If the worst comes to the worst you can record it into Audacity: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_recording_computer_playback_on_windows.html using Windows WASAPI (loopback).

But FFmpeg would likely import it OK.

Gale