After importing into Audacity, I see a screwy waveform, and when I try to play it I hear only pops and static. At that point audacity is hung, and must be killed.
“mplayer”, “aplay”, “paplay”, and “audacious” can play the file without any problems.
What could be the problem?
I’m using Fedora 21 (x86_64) and audacity v2.0.6. Let me know if I should provide a sample from the ZOOM device.
Copy the files to your hard drive first, then check that they play OK in another application (such as Banshee, or whatever your default audio player), then import the hard drive copies into Audacity.
um, very kind of you to answer, but did you read my post?
I quoted the output of the “file” command on linux, which kind of implies that the H5 files were already on my “hard disk” (or at least that the files can be accessed on some filesystem).
I wrote that “mplayer”, “aplay”, “paplay”, and “audacious” can handle the H5 files without problem. These are four example of linux audio-playback utilities that have no problem with the H5 files. Also kinda implies that I had already moved the files from the H5 to my Linux box.
You want banshee? ok, tested with banshee, also no problem.
Yes I did, and nowhere did you say that the files had been copied to your hard drive.
Does that mean that your files have been copied to your hard drive or that the files have not been copied to your hard drive?
I presume from the fact that you qualified your answer that the files have not been copied to your hard drive, so I would suggest that you try the suggestion in my first post. Yes it can make a difference where Audacity is reading the files from, particularly with uncompressed file types such as WAV.
the very first thing I did was to copy the H5 files to the linux system hard drive. This was the only way I accessed the files using any linux programs.
After I copied the files to my hard drive, I used the utilities mentioned in my original post to play them. All linux utilities are able to play the H5 files successfully.
Importing H5 files into audacity (from my local hard drive) leads to the problem mentioned in my original post.
Apparently my pulseaudio config had gotten wedged – but only (AFAICT) when playing a WAV file with audacity. I changed a few PA parameters and restarted PA, and now audacity can read the ZOOM file perfectly well and play it.
Thanks for your help, and sorry to have wasted your time.
