Audacity Forum

Audacity Dev Team:

I recently encountered a strange occurrence within an Mp3 file. I am not sure if this problem occurred during the Import / Export process or moving the exported Mp3 to another destination (???). In short, my recorded audio (44mins) exported, somehow truncated down to 18mins. The file size shows 40MB on disk, which when compared to other recordings of similar content, is within range of correct size. However, when imported or played back from windows media player, it just stops at 18mins. The strange thing is that windows media player reports the audio length as 44mins, not 18. It was clearly 44mins long before the export on another computer. I would take a look at the source and debug it, but i would not know where to start. Do you guys have any idea what could have happened? Is this somehow a bug?

EDIT:: I would also like to add that this also happen with 1.2.x
-- Chris

Do you have LOTS of free disk space on your C: drive?
Audacity works with uncompressed audio - by default it is 32 bit audio, which for a single stereo track uses around 20MB per minute of audio, so that's around 1GB of data for that one file. When you do any editing, Audacity creates "undo data", so the amount of data rapidly multiplies to several gigabytes.

Also, some MP3 players have trouble with VBR encoded MP3 files - you could try exporting as CBR which will make the MP3 more compatible than VBR. In Audacity 1.2, the MP3 settings are in "Preferences" (Edit > Preferences). In Audacity 1.3 the settings are in "Options" in the Export dialogue.