Track plays SLOW upon importing

[wellesradio]

Hello,
Beginner here. WIndows Vista Basic.

I'm trying to mix two tracks together. Actually, just a snippet on one so that it plays simultaneously during a portion of another track as background noise. I opened one file and edited it down to a few seconds. Then I opened the longer track (about 3.5 minutes long) and noticed that when I hit play the longer track plays in slow-mo while the short snippet plays at regular speed. I exported the mix to MP3 thinking it would resolve, but no. The mixed version plays the majority in slow mo.

Why does it play slowly immediately upon importing?

Both tracks are mp3's. So why is one affected and not the other?

I tried speeding it up, but why go to all that bother to get it just right again? Its speed should never have been tampered to begin with.

[kozikowski]

Audacity is a terrible converter. It's good to make sure that all the music in a production is in exactly the same sound format before you start mixing. I would convert all the music to one single, uncompressed WAV format, like 44100, 16-bit, Stereo and then I bet all the speed problems vanish.

You can use Super or Switch to do the conversions, or iTunes for Windows if you have it.

Koz

[kozikowski]

MP3 compressed files carry baggage from the original files that made them. It's not a one-size-fitz-all format. If some of your music came from video and some came from CD, there might be differences in the MP3.

Koz

[steve]

If you upgrade to Audacity 1.3.12 (the recommended version for Vista) these problems will probably go away.
Audacity 1.2 has limited capabilities of handling files with different formats or sample rates.

http://audacityteam.org/download/