Audacity Forum

I have files that are already mp3. I need to make several short clips from each of these mp3 files. I make my selection and export selection as mp3, but the resulting file is 0 or 1 KB. When I try to open the file in Windows Media Player it says: "Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file." And sometimes I also get a pop-up window saying "COM surrogate has encountered a problem."
My original mp3 files are fine, I have listened to them in Windows Media Player. I just cannot get these short clips to work. I also have tried making the selection, then use cut, open a new project in Audacity and use paste, then export as MP3. THis is for my job, so it's really important. Any help will be appreciated. I've tried these things dozens of times.

How short are these clips? Even at lower bit rates, a 1KB mp3 is going to be well under 1 second in length. I'm guessing that they haven't actually been written correctly.

In order to test that, can you open these files you've created in Audacity? If you can open and play them in Audacity, then the files are fine. Windows Media Player takes a few pages from the book of fascism when it comes to playing files that are DRM-free (as far as we can tell). We get more complaints about WMP than any other Windows program.

If you can't open those files in Audacity, then we'll have to dig deeper.

Com surrogate problem is hopefully unrelated, but it might not be. I just found this page detailing how to fix it after a quick search:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows- ... -in-vista/

I'm not a Vista user, so I'm not familiar with this Com surrogate problem.

Thanks very much for helping me with this. I tried opening the files in audacity and get this message: "Audacity did not recognize the type of this file. If it is uncompressed, try importing it using "Import Raw." But it is compressed. These original files were recorded on a conference call service, but seem to be just fine regular mp3 files. My previous experience in making small clips from larger files (the originals were audacity files) went just fine, so I can't fathom the problem.

Hm...

I don't know what to say, since you've successfully done this before. can you export them as .wav files?

Thank you for continuing to look at this. This morning a colleague at work figured out the problem. The conference-call-recording service recorded at a different bit rate and HZ than the settings I had on Audacity. When I changed my settings (to lower values to match the original recordings), things are working. A huge relief.