WAV that freezes Audacity

Hi, I’ve been using Audacity for several years. Today I tryied open a WAV file (music) that crashes it. I’m running the latest version (3.6.4) on Windows 10 Pro. The WAV file plays fine in all other audio software (Soundforge, VLC, WinAmp…). I’ve never had any problems with other WAV files, this is a specific case.

Would you be interested in a copy to check if there are any problems? My intention is to help improve Audacity, but I don’t know if this is a big deal. I haven’t tested it on another PC because I don’t have another one with Audacity installed.

Anyway, just checking… Thanks.

Well, any way, the file is here. My CPU goes 100% (1 core) and freeze in the small window “importing wav”.

Have you tried a different WAV file?

My guess is that it’s not really a (regular uncompressed) WAV file, or there might be something wrong with it. Sometimes Audacity is more picky than other software.

Usually WAV files are pretty foolproof, if they are good.

It didn’t work for me either, but…

I “converted” to new WAV file with Kabuu Audio Converter and it was OK!

MediaInfo says it’s a normal (uncompressed PCM) WAV file.

If I get a chance later I might look at the file header to see if I can spot the problem/difference. (Not that it will help with anything.)

Yes, any other WAV works fine.

Yes, normally WAV files does not have problems, that’s why I’ve reported.

This file freezes only Audacity, no other sw.

Yes, converting using FFMPEG (-i wav -o wav) works, with no error.

Ok, just to improve the sw and avoid anything like this to other users. Thanks!

So yeah… The header is messed-up. It actually has the text “WAVEJUNK” where it’s supposed to say “WAVEfmt”. I didn’t look any further but that’s clearly a problem.

If you care… The WAV header is supposed to be the 1st 44 bytes. WAV file format

I used a Hex Editor (XVI32) to look at the file. A hex editor allows you to look at the bytes in any file in hexadecimal. And any hex value that converts to a text character will be shown as text. The hex editor doesn’t know if it’s supposed to be text or not. If you look at the audio data some of the hex values will be shown as text even though it’s really just a byte in an audio sample value.

Following the header there are thousands of zeros which is silence. At 44.1kHz, 16-bit, stereo there are 176K bytes per second, and your file has about 1/4 of a second of silence at the beginning.

Yes, now I can see “WAVEJUNK” too, using Frhed Hex Editor.

So if the header is not correct, there is nothing to do. The file is not really mine, I am a DJ and I always edit/process music in Audacity. I got this file from a music promoter.

Well, if you can detect these bytes and alert with an “invalid format” message, that would be great. Just to avoid freezing the application. Anyway, it is not that critical, since I have never had problems before with a zillion WAV files.

Thanks!


Searching for fun, I found this:

and

““RIFF¢0 WAVEJUNK”, which are wav files exported from Pro Tools”