Why does the file play so fast?

[lamaking]

I use a olympus digital recorder. When i play the file on my media player it plays fine. But when i open the file in Audacity, it plays an hours worth of recording lightning fast. I can't make out anything because it plays the file so fast. What can I do to make it play normal. Plz reply.

Audacity 1.2.6
Vista

[steve]

The file is in a format that is not supported by Audacity 1.2.6.
Audacity 1.3.9 may be able to handle the format, but only if you also install ffmpeg.
(for Windows, see here: http://audacityteam.org/download/beta_windows

If Audacity 1.3.9 can not import it correctly, then you will need to convert the file to a supported file type (recommended format = WAV).
SUPER by erightsoft is a freeware program for Windows that can probably do the conversion.

[lamaking]

I tried the beta version with exactly the same results....I know this happened before several years ago when i used to use this program. I just don't remember what to do in order for it to play back properly. Changing the file to a wave file did nothing. But as I said, it plays an hours worth of recording in like 2 seconds. Please reply.

[steve]

"Years ago" Audacity did not use ffmpeg and it could only support the following file types:
WAV, AIFF, OGG, MP3, FLAC.
Now that Audacity 1.3.x supports the ffmpeg import library it is able to import and export many more file types.

it plays an hours worth of recording in like 2 seconds.

That is an absolutely typical symptom of trying to import a compressed file format that Audacity does not support. I've come across this before with Olympus digital recorders - some of them have a default file format of WMA but WMA files are not supported by Audacity 1.2.x and are only supported by recent versions of 1.3.x with ffmpeg installed. Some Olympus recorders will allow you to set the recording format to WAV or MP3, which are supported by all versions of Audacity (you would need to check your Olympus manual to find out if your recorder can do this or not).

Changing the file to a wave file did nothing.

How did you "change" the file? It's not just a matter of changing the name, the file needs to be decoded.