no sound when I copy wav to itunes

[rclepper]

I've been editing music recordings in Audacity (captured by H4N). All has been going well until a few hours ago when my wav files suddenly stopped playing in itunes. This has happened on three of the last four wav files I created. The previous dozen or so wav files transferred successfuly and still play. The three unsuccessful files seem to copy normally into itunes and the runtime meter indicates the song is playing but there is no sound. I have tried redoing the files from scratch, but no go.

[kozikowski]

If the green sound meter(s) are bouncing, then the computer is playing the music, but maybe just to the wrong place. If you have a USB sound device connected you might try disconnecting it and restarting Audacity. Close Skype. Also, you can go into Apple > System Preferences > Hardware > Sound > Output and make sure Line-Out or Headphone Out is selected. Then restart Audacity and make sure the Device Toolbar output is selected to the same thing.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Device_Toolbar

Koz

[rclepper]

Thanks, Koz. Skype is not on. Headphones is selected in output in sound in hardware in system preferences. No sound devices are connected to a USB port. I'm going to try shutting down the computer and will try again in the morning.

[kozikowski]

You didn't say the magic words "the green sound meters are bouncing." The meters may be a different graphic length, but they should look something like this.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_playback.jpg

Note the green meters are up around -6 and the blue waves have sharp peaks over 0.5. That's a perfect sound recording.

In Audacity 1.3, you can grab the bar to the right of the meters and pull sideways to make them bigger. The rest of the tools will get out of the way.

Koz

[rclepper]

Yes, the green meters are bouncing merrily along in Audacity. And I can hear it playing through the headphones. It's when I transfer the files to itunes where the sound fails to come through the speakers, even thought the runtime meter indicates the file is playing. When I toggle from the itunes runtime meter to the graphic display of sound levels, no levels appear.
This morning, when I rebooted and went back into itunes, one of the files that was not playing last night in itunes, was playing fine. However, the original file that presented this problem is still not working, even though it plays in Audacity as an aup file (with green light bouncing.)

One thing I did notice though, the first time I reopened the aup file in Audacity to try and find out what was wrong, I got an error message saying that there were 580-some odd orphan files that did not belong to that aup file and asked me if I wanted to delete them or not. I took this to mean that some glitch had occurred in the creatiion of the export (wav) file, and that part of the wav file had become attached to the aup file. I deleted them (the dialong box presented that as an option), resaved the aup file, exported again, but still no sound in i-tunes, neither last night, nor this morning.

The only thing I can think of is to start over from scratch with the original wav file from the H4N.

[kozikowski]

Are you certain you're using Audacity 1.3? Which version exactly?

Have you ever done a Verify Disk on your hard drive(s)? When you Control-Click on your hard drive and Get Info, what does it say for space left?

There might be something very basic wrong to have this much instability on a Mac. That's something the Windows people have, and even at that, not that much anymore.

Open up one of the files that fails in iTunes, but in QuickTime Player and Command-I Get INFO. what does that say?

Koz