Audacity Forum

I recently purchased an mp3 file on Amazon.com hoping to import it into audacity and play it. The import was successful but I get no sound when I play it. Any ideas?

The import was successful

How do you know it was successful? Do you see the waveform? Have you tried other files?

but I get no sound when I play it.

Make sure you've selected the correct Playback Device.

to import it into audacity and play it.

I assume you also wanted to edit it?

...As you may know, MP3 is lossy compression. When you open in Audacity it gets decompressed. If you then re-export as MP3 it goes through another generation of lossy compression and the "damage" accumulates. So, try to minimize the number of times it's compressed.

There are some special-purpose MP3 editors, such as MP3directCut that can do some limited editing without decompressing the MP3.

tomholder wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 17, 2021 7:44 pm

I recently purchased an mp3 file on Amazon.com hoping to import it into audacity and play it. The import was successful but I get no sound when I play it. Any ideas?

What happens when you start with an empty Audacity project, Generate DTMF Tones, then try to play it?