Problem with compressed audio file

Audacity 3 Help Forum GNU/Linux
1

Hi everyone,

I use Audacity 2.3.3 as packaged in Debian Bullseye.

When I import a call record from Linphone, which is an opus-encoded MKV container, Audacity plays the record correctly, but doesn’t let me split any parts of it. The menu field “Edit → Clip Boundaries → Split” is greyed out and remains like this as long as my selection is smaller than the entire track.

This behaviour doesn’t change by converting the MKV file to WAV with ffmpeg before opening it in Audacity. With an “original” WAV file that was never converted from any other format, splitting works fine.

What are the technical reasons for this behaviour? I am not happy editing compressed files, but I got them, so now I have to use them.

Thank you for your suggestions,

Carl

2

You are misinterpreting the problem.
When an audio file is “Imported” into Audacity, the audio data is copied from the file into the Audacity project. By default the imported audio is converted to 32-bit float PCM. Thus the format of the imported file is irrelevant to actions within Audacity because Audacity is working on a copy of the data, not on the file.

Note that “Split” is not available when playback is paused. Click the “Stop” button or press “Space” to stop playback.

3

This is good to know, it solves my self-created problem. Thank you for this and the clarification regarding the import process!