Audacity Forum

Hey I'm new to Audacity and I have a bit of a problem. I download songs from Napster and everytime I try to open a song that I download from there on Audacity, only the first few milliseconds (yes, milliseconds) of the song will come up and not the rest of the song...so when I play it, all you hear is a little blip sound. I've even tried converting the songs into MP3s (when I download them, they come in WMA format) with a program called Protected Music Converter but even then, the same thing will happen...only a small blip sound will play. And the strange thing is that when I play the songs on Windows Media Player, they'll play fine, but when I load them onto Audacity, then like I said before, only the first few milliseconds of the song will play making a little blip sound. I was wondering if anyone might know why this happens. And if it helps, I use Windows XP.

It sounds like either the DRM is getting in the way or you are not getting proper MP3s from your converter software.

What you can do is to play your music file with WMP (or any other music software that will play the file) and use Audacity to record it while it is playing. This will take longer than directly importing into Audacity, but should work ok for you.

WC