Audacity Forum

I looked at Youtube and thought it should be possible for me to download my old cassette tapes using Audacity. It’s not as easy as they suggest.

I downloaded Audacity 1.2.6 for my Windows XP without any trouble. Attached my Walkman to the line-in socket with jack plugs. Pressed record on Audacity and play on the Walkman and got the appropriate wave patterns. Stopped Walkman. Stopped Audacity and used play button to check I had recorded the test music. I had. Then came the problems. I used ‘Export’ and highlighted and saved the music in .wav format. But I cannot get this file to play.

On Youtube they do not mention having to save the music as a Project BEFORE exporting. Do you have to do this? Is there something in the Preferences section I should have altered? Why will the music not play on Windows Media Play?

Please – any info would be much appreciated in simple words that this not very genned-up and puzzled pensioner can understand.

Whitehills

You do not need to Save an Audacity project before Exporting - I often work on Audacity projects where I never bother to save a project at all just using Exports and then discarding the project when finished.

Are you working in 2-channel stereo? Have you reset the Audacity 1.2 default to do so?

If so then you should be able to export WAV files at the Audacity default of 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM Stereo. You should be able to examine these files with Windows Explorer to look at the file's Properties - check that is a 16-bit PCM stereo WAV file,

If it is it should play on most player s/w including WMP. Do you have any other media player s/w? If bot you could try downloading iTunes from the Apple site and inporting your WAV into iTunes to see if iTunes will play it.

WC

Thank you so much for this information. At least I can cross off one query - about not saving as a Project. Tomorrow I will look at the rest of the information you have given me and see if I can see what is wrong.

And thanks also for not getting too technical!

Whitehills

Thank you so much - it has worked! All I had to do was change the Mono to Stereo (all the other info you gave me checked out just fine), start from scratch and the file played in Media Player.

I am so thrilled - you've made my day.

Whitehills