File opens as pure noise in Audacity

[Newrone]

I have a few 48kHz 16bit files I have recorded in SoundForge. They will open and play fine in every other media player.

Except Audacity, where they form a pure noise file listed as 48kHz 24bit!

How come?
Any ideas on how to get Audacity to behave properly?

[steve]

What format are the files?
Audacity 1.2.x only supports importing WAV, AIFF, Flac, Ogg Vorbis and MP3.

[Newrone]

Dead ordinary WAVs.

[steve]

There may be a problem in the old 1.2.x version with 24-bit WAV files. Try upgrading to Audacity 1.3.13. You can get it here: http://audacityteam.org/download/

You do not need to uninstall 1.2.6, but you can't run both versions at the same time. Audacity 1.3.13 can open projects that have been created by Audacity 1.2.x, but Audacity 1.2.x cannot open projects that have been saved by Audacity 1.3.x.

[Newrone]

OK I'll try that, thx. I though 1.3 was still in beta.

[steve]

I though 1.3 was still in beta.

Officially, yes it is, but it's a very mature beta - basically, Audacity 1.3.13 will become Audacity 2.0, but the developers want to iron out a few remaining niggles before it is reborn as Audacity 2.0.

The last couple of 1.3.x version have been very good and on modern computers it is more stable than the "stable" version. All development ended on the 1.2.x series some years ago and now it's just too old.