WMA audio

[tedkopel69]

Hey guys,

I use an Olympus digital voice recorder for sports press conferences and interviews and then need to quickly and efficiently edit and upload them to a web site as mp3 files.

I know that Audacity says it won't import WMA files but I swear, I have been importing them, editing them, and then exporting to MP3 with Audacity v. 1.3.8 for the past three months. The only update I've made to my macbook in the past few days has been a Flip4Mac upgrade, which I uninstalled but has had no effect on getting Audacity to recognize the WMA files again.

To be honest, I didn't know that Audacity even claimed to not import WMA files. It just always worked until yesterday.

I understand I can use ffmpegx to convert the WMA to mp3 and then edit the mp3 in audacity and export it from there, but after a few test runs, that appears to add about 15 minutes onto the process that had once literally taken just a couple of minutes.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what I can do to work around this?

[kozikowski]

<<<It just always worked until yesterday. >>>

It's also correct. Another post assures us that Olympus uses IMA compressed files and Audacity does know what those are. Windows assumes everything is a Windows Media file until proven otherwise.

Flip4Mac.

We have Flip4Mac licenses to get in and out of Windows Media Video. It loads an invisible driver in the background and everything suddenly starts working. I don't know how it works for audio.

Also from another post, Trash your Audacity Preferences file to get this functionality back.

Trash Mac Audacity Preferences
http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... =10#p34670

Koz

[Grey Swan]

Hi All - (my first post....)
On a related matter - I had reason to convert Olympus DSS files recently and found this free app (the Lite version)
http://www.olympusvoice.com.au/downloads/index.html

Related to WMA files: I just purchased a hand-held device that records them at 48K SR (in stereo). I can read/import them into Audacity OK but when I try to export them it won't permit the export to be at 48K - 44.1 seems to be the max SR. Is there any reason for this restriction, any chance of an update?

thanks,

Dave.

[kozikowski]

Can you change the values before you export?

Depth/Rate Conversion
-- Change Project Rate (Hz) lower left > 48000
-- Track Name > Set Sample Format > 16-bit PCM
-- File > Export > Format > Other uncompressed File Types

Koz

[Grey Swan]

Can you change the values before you export?

Depth/Rate Conversion
-- Change Project Rate (Hz) lower left > 48000
-- Track Name > Set Sample Format > 16-bit PCM
-- File > Export > Format > Other uncompressed File Types

Koz

Hi Kos,
Thanks for replying.
WMA is a listed format and is not available under Other Compressed File Types . The bit format is changeable under the Options... requester. Clicking through to Save results in an Invalid Sample Rate exception, with the option to change it. Options only go as high as 44.1K i.e. 48K is not one of them, despite the project having been correctly imported at that rate.

David

[kozikowski]

I'm digging in my Windows Media for Dummies book. We need to remember that Widows Media is a proprietary format and I somehow doubt that anybody is paying Microsoft licensing fees. So the codec is a fudge job.

If you were going to create a convenient subset of WMA, then 44100 is a good compromise. I suspect that if you converted your work to WMV, the video version, that would be able to handle 48000, the video sound standard.

Make friends with somebody with a Windows machine. All the latest versions of Windows Media will convert your work to WMA.

If you were certifiably insane, you could get Parallels and a Windows License and run Windows in your Mac. That will produce a fully compliant WMA file.

I own Parallels, but in my defense, I've never installed it.

Koz