Hello,
this is my first time posting on the forum, so I apologise for clumsy behaviour beforehand.
I’ve got audacity 2.0.1. on a notebook running on windows XP with servicepack 3 installed (however, the problem pertains on other computers as well).
The problem is as follows: I recorded several (50+) files for a kind of audiobook with a Marantz handheld recorder as .WAV with 44100 kHz, mono, 32-bit float. On the recorder as well as with VLC, I can play all of the files perfectly and in good quality. The same is mostly true for audacity, i.e. I can access and play most of the files - but not all of them (even though those ones also run perfectly on VLC). I cannot see a reason why some of the files should not be recognized and the others work fine - they were all recorded in exactly the same way, and the ratio seems to be roughly 10:1 good files vs. unreadable ones. Audacity doesn’t give me any error message after importing the file, it just takes no time whatsoever to import and then shows an empty track with no waveform and no time. It seems audacity doesn’t recognize the audio recorded on the file. Similarly, windows media player can’t play the file either, and doesn’t display file length - there it also seems as if it doesn’t recognize the audio at all. When I try to import the files as raw data, all I get is noise (different kinds of noise with different settings, but total noise with an indiscriminate waveform nonetheless).
I tried converting the files with VLC, since that seems to be the only program capable of recognizing the audio, and playing around with different complicated settings (that I don’t really understand) I produced different .ps files, some of which VLC can play, some of which it can’t - on audacity however they either turn out as nothing or as noise again. I really don’t have much knowledge about the whole conversion process, so if someone could help me with that, I would be very happy.
In general, if anyone knows anything about the problem involved (I can’t even tell why some of the files work and some don’t at all - I’ve considered re-recording, but as far as I can tell, even then I couldn’t be sure that they would then work), whether about the reasons, or how I can get audacity to recognise the audio, or how to convert them into something useful, I would be immensely grateful.
Thanks a million in advance,
all the best,
Leon Hart