Audacity Forum

Running on xp, I have successfully imported several WMA files and exported them into MP3 format. Now, suddenly, new files I import are compressed in time to a couple of seconds and when played of course, sound just like a quick squeek!
What am i doing wrong - it can't be much as it was working ok a few minutes previous.

Windows assumes any file it doesn't understand or want to bother with is a Windows Media File. You only know it's not if you have Windows show you File Extensions instead of hiding them.

-- 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

So you could have been converting Microsoft WAV files which work in Audacity natively.

The first time you hit a "real" Windows Media file, Audacity would have played it as a foreign file which is does with the compression intact -- hence the squeak.

Download and install FFMpeg software from here.

http://audacityteam.org/download/

Koz

Thanks Koz
The files I'm importing truly are true WMA files and I already have the FFmpeg for Audacity program loaded. I've tried again and it is still compressing songs to lengths of les than a second so I'm really stuck. I can't understand how it worked for about 8 files then suddenly stopped, using exactly the same file types, etc.
Graham

There are several different types of WMA files. FFMPeg supports WMA version 2.
Just as Microsoft keeps changing the format of .DOC files so that people have to buy the new version of Office, they have also changed the format of WMA files several times. If FFMPeg does not support the type of WMA files that you have then you will need to convert them to a supported file type (such as WAV) before you import them into Audacity.