Audacity Forum

A couple of weeks ago I posted a comment and haven't received any suggestions. Basically I have audacity files labelled on a vista machine (laptop) that will not play (everything looks OK, just no sound) when transferred to an XP machine (desktop). The XP will play audacity files created on it.
Since then, working only on the XP, I have found that if I save the audacity file as a wav file and try to play that through whatever it is that windows brings up, it will not play. The original wav will. I have recovered the audacity file that will not play by reading the original wav file in as extra stereo tracks (fortunately I had only labelled the track, not edited it) and deleting the old tracks (except for the label track).
Does this help anyone see what is happening?

Oh, yes.

"Save" in Audacity produces a Project which is not a sound file, but a production management environment consisting of sometimes hundreds and frequently thousands of individual files--not all of them sound. Projects make good editing because they're very fast, agile, and versatile. However, you can't move them, transfer them or email them to anybody. At least normal people can't, and they're brittle and prone to damage.

"Export" on the other hand, produces, among other formats, Microsoft WAV formatted sound files which should be usable by almost any computer on the face of the earth. This is the format we use to transfer sound files between Windows, Mac, and Linux machines at the shop.

I will tell you that the Audacity default WAV format is 32-bit floating which may or may not be acceptable to other machines. I personally do production in 16-bit 48000 which happens to be a very good format and directly compatible with all of our audio systems and our video systems.

Set all this in Audacity Preferences the location of which changes slightly with the platform.

Koz