Audacity Won't Play My Song!

[Holly3278]

Hi everyone. I am having a lot of trouble with Audacity. I click File and then Open and I'll then click the MP3 that I want to load in Audacity. I then click the play button in Audacity to preview the song and see if I can find where the errors in the song are at. Well, Audacity then proceeds to play less than 1 second of audio. It's not loading the entire song! Please help me fix this!

[kozikowski]

<<I'll then click the MP3>>>

Where exactly did the MP3 come from?

Koz

[Holly3278]

<<I'll then click the MP3>>>

Where exactly did the MP3 come from?

Koz

It came from a CD that I own. I ripped the CD on to my computer. But Audacity does this with all of my music.

[kozikowski]

This could go off in several different directions. Let's try something. Pull down piano2-CoolEdit.mp3 from here...

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

...and see if that plays OK. It's 6 seconds long.

Do you know you have MP3 files? All audio files are not MP3. Ripped CD music is likely to be WAV format, not MP3.

Koz

[Holly3278]

This could go off in several different directions. Let's try something. Pull down piano2-CoolEdit.mp3 from here...

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

...and see if that plays OK. It's 6 seconds long.

Do you know you have MP3 files? All audio files are not MP3. Ripped CD music is likely to be WAV format, not MP3.

Koz

I'm sorry. I was wrong. I clicked File and Properties and it said that it is a Windows Media Audio File.

[kozikowski]

So there you have it. Audacity 1.2 has no idea how to manage a Windows Media File. Directions could be "Super" or Switch" two conversion programs (Google), or Audacity 1.3 has some interesting support tricks. You can install both 1.2 and 1.3 on the same machine, but only use one at a time.

Koz

[EgyptionEyez90]

Hi, I downloaded Audacity Beta some time ago, I've been using audacity for all my recording needs, and never had any problems, till today. I try to replay what ive recorded and it tells me this.."an unhandled exception occurred. Press "abort" to terminate the program, "retry" to exit the program normally and "ignore" to try to continue." And it slowly led to this because i noticed before it wouldn't let me at all, no matter how many times i rebooted my computer, it was taking about 5 seconds just to play it back to me. Can you help me? Do you have any idea why its doing this?

[steve]

I've been using audacity for all my recording needs, and never had any problems, till today.

So we need to try and work out what has changed between yesterday and today.

Have you run a full virus check recently? If not, run one now (full system scan) and leave it overnight to complete.

Assuming the scan is clean....
Do you have a recent "restore point" that you can wind Windows back to? If so, restore to that point with your internet disconnected and try using Audacity. Make a note of any programs that try to connect to the internet.

If Audacity works, Set your firewall to block all programs from connecting to the internet and connect your computer to the internet. Check the firewall log to see which programs are trying to connect. There may be some programs that want to update. Allow them to update one at a time and test Audacity between each update. This may reveal if a program update is causing the problem.

[Holly3278]

So I should download Audacity 1.3?

[steve]

So I should download Audacity 1.3?

What was the original question.... (looks back through previous posts)... how to edit a WMA file?

Yes. the latest version of Audacity supports WMA with the aid of FFmpeg (an additional program), but it is a very new feature and can be a bit tricky to set up. The easiest way to edit WMA files is to first convert them to WAV format. As Koz previously mentioned, there are a number of programs that can convert WMA to WAV. I use the free program "SUPER" by erightsoft.

If you are completely new to Audacity you may want to try that approach first (convert with SUPER or Switch or another format converter and then edit the WAV file).

Having said that, you can certainly try out Audacity 1.3 (it's free)
You can have both Audacity 1.2 and 1.3 on your computer but there are a couple of limitations: You cannot run both versions simultaneously. Also, note that Audacity 1.3 can open projects that have been saved by Audacity 1.2, but Audacity 1.2 can not open projects that have been saved by Audacity 1.3.