Audacity Forum

Hello, new user here. I need to use Audacity to excerpt some sections of a long audio file (33 minutes). When I import it into Audacity, the 33 minute clip is only 18 minutes long.

When I drag the clip into GarageBand, the clip is the full 33 minutes.

Is there a time limit on Audacity clips?

If that was less than clear, Audacity is cutting off my clip.

It's 18 minutes long, but does it sound funny? Audacity's reaction to a foreign file format that it doesn't understand is to play it as if it were uncompressed. If it happens to actually be compressed, you get things like a 3 minute song that plays in fifteen seconds.

What is this file and if you open it in QuickTime Player and press Apple-I, what does that say?

Oh, wait. It's cutting off the clip? You just get to the violin part and the clip stops dead? Audacity will do that if it runs out of hard drive space. How full are all your drives and which ones are selected for Audacity to use as scratch space?

Koz

kozikowski wrote:What is this file and if you open it in QuickTime Player and press Apple-I, what does that say?

Source: /Desktop/STE-0005.wav
Format: 24 Bit integer (Little Endian), Stereo, 96.000 khz
Data Size: 612.56 MB
Data Rate: 4626.06 kbits/sec
Current Time (zero)
Duration: 00:18:35:13

kozikowski wrote:Oh, wait. It's cutting off the clip? You just get to the violin part and the clip stops dead? Audacity will do that if it runs out of hard drive space. How full are all your drives and which ones are selected for Audacity to use as scratch space?

Exactly, Audacity only recognizes a portion of my clip. According to Quicktime and Audacity, the clip is 18 minutes long. But when I drag it into Garageband, it recognizes the clip's length as 40 minutes (when I said 38, I was wrong). Weirdly, I can't seem to correlate the two versions in Garage Band and Audacity (the beginning and end of the clips are different, leading me to believe that Audacity only shows me an 18 min. segment from the center. The audio is pretty abstract and there is no vocal (or other) cue I can use to figure out what's getting cut off, without spending loads of time analyzing both tracks.

I have 21 GBs of space on one drive, and 40 GB of space on another drive.

I tried to learn more about Audacity using Help, but then Audacity asked me to locate a Help file that didn't get downloaded, apparently. I'm using Mac 10.4.11

BTW, when I drag the file into iTunes, it's 18 minutes long (18:35).

But (again) when I drag it into Garage Band, it's 40 minutes. (The exact same file, dragged from my desktop, is different lengths depending on the application).

This has been a problem for a couple of days, so "restart" is not going to help.

Any ideas?

If I remember correctly, it was recorded at 24 bit, 96kbps (I think I have that right.... highest quality setting on a Zoom H2 recorder). Garage Band supposedly doesn't like anything beyond 16 bits, yet recognizes the file correctly.

<<<Garage Band supposedly doesn't like anything beyond 16 bits, yet recognizes the file correctly.>>>

That may be, but Audacity hates 24 bit files. Apparently, the conflict only happens on the Mac version.

Koz