Audacity Forum

Hi,
I'm running Audacity 1.2.6 on Windows XP SP2, and everything goes fine until I try to import audio into my project. I created a new project, saved it, and then went project->import audio (ctrl+i). I navigated to the location of the WAV file I wanted to import, and clicked OK. I get the standard "Audacity has encountered a problem and needs to close" crashing error message.

Why am I not able to import audio into my project - is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks in advance,
~rbedi100

<<<I navigated to the location of the WAV file I wanted to import>>>

Do you have Windows set to show you file extensions? How do you know you're trying to manage a WAV file?

WAV and MP3 files are very specific types of files and not every sound file is automatically one or the other.

Audacity can do that if it runs out of room. How big is your hard drive and how much room do you have? Numbers are good.

Koz

I have a similar problem. The first time I tried to import a WAV file (an exported audio file from Adobe Premiere) Audacity.exe "encountered a problem and needs to close" (my computer runs XP with a 2.7G AMD processor). After two more aborted attempts I tried uninstalling and installing again. Same thing happened.

Hi Koz,
Thanks for your reply - I know its a wav file because I checked its properties (and because I made it ). I have 290 GB free on my 350 GB hard drive, 3.2 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM.

Thx,
rbedi100

Forgot to add I have two 250G drives and a 750G. I have recently cleaned them up and have just under 50% on each so it's not because the drives are overcrowded.
I wanted to try audacity because a friend who does radio work likes it so much.

I found the answer to this by digging through the code in a debugger. Something is definitely at least slightly different with WAV files exported from Premiere CS3. Something inside libsndfile 1.0.16 causes memory corruption. It's not an issue with audacity but one of the libraries it uses.

Fortunately, libsndfile 1.0.19 doesn't have this crash, so you should see this fixed in a future release provided they upgrade the version of libsndfile they are using.

Update: I uploaded a WAV file that causes this behavior (forum doesn't allow WAV uploads?): http://baltimorebarcams.com/thebadness.wav

Just run this code vs libsndfile 1.0.16 to repro:

SF_INFO info;
SNDFILE *file;
memset(&info, 0, sizeof(info));
file = sf_open("thebadness.wav", SFM_READ, &info);
sf_close(file);

That will crash.

-Dom