Audacity Forum

Hi,

I'm having a problem exporting a recording I made of a school lecture into any of the other possible file types.
I didn't have time to do it at the end of my class because I had to catch the bus, so I just saved the recording as a .aup file. When I got home, I went to export it, and when I did so, it didn't seem to save the file with the audio format I chose, which was WMA. I tried all the other formats (MP3, AAC, WAV, etc) and the same thing happens. When I go to open the file in iTunes, it won't open it because it doesn't have the file extension with it, even though I have selected one.
Also, it only seems to be doing it for this recording. I've done other test recordings, exported, and opened in iTunes, and it works fine.
I'm really not sure what to do. A message also pops up when I try to export this file, and it says,

"You are about to save a WMA file with the name _____. Normally these files end in '.wma', and some programs will not open files with nonstandard extensions. Are you sure you want to save the file under this name?"

Any idea what the problem is? I've downloaded the LAME and AIFF extensions as well.

Thanks for the help,

Trevor S.

You're not hallucinating. Audacity will not Save a sound file.

<<<so I just saved the recording as a .aup file. >>>

Well, no. You saved an Audacity Project one of whose many files is an AUP file.

Open the Project in Audacity and Export a WAV file.

Koz

I've done that, and the same thing happens as with all the other formats.

I get that same error message if I try to save a file with some odd characters in the file name---like a parenthesis, for instance. Try to export the file with a plain vanilla file name and rename it later if you need to.

As funny as that last post sounds, doing that worked. I took out the period in the file name and now it's exporting fine. Thanks!

Do you have Windows set to show you file name extensions? Windows comes out of the box hiding the dot and three letter extension based on the idea that you don't really need it. That hasn't been my experience, but I'm not a multi-billion dollar corporation.

So when you see MyMusic somewhere, rest assured that it's really MyMusic.wav or MyMusic.mp3 and Windows is just hiding the extension from you. This relying on the Windows icon would be OK if Windows didn't occasionally scramble the icons "to help you."

So you were probably trying to save a music file called MyMusic.wav.wav.

When you start having troubles at the file level, it's strongly recommended that you force Windows to show you the whole filename.

Hidden File Extensions
-- Start > My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View > [ ] Hide Extensions for Known File Types (deselect)
-- Apply (to this folder) or Apply to All Folders
-- OK

I generally apply it to all folders.

Koz