problem importing WAV file

[longtale]

I have a 12 minute WAV file that I imported using Project|Import Audio. It resulted in a audacity project file of less than half a second - and it is just a high pitched squeak when I play it in Audacity. Am I missing something really basic?

[kozikowski]

<<<Am I missing something really basic?>>>

You may be missing a wave file. If Audacity doesn't know what the file type is (and it's compressed) it plays very fast. If you Click, Get Into or Right Click, Properties, what does it say? I'm betting it's not a Windows Wave File.

Koz

[kozikowski]

<<<It resulted in a audacity project file>>>

I'm trying to make up my mind whether you picked a bad couple of words or not. You can't exactly play an Audacity Project file. I'm assuming you tried to play a foreign sound file that you thought was a WAV file and it played funny.

Koz

[longtale]

The file came from a no brand/white label camera/recorder. It claims to be a vlc wave file, which I thought was because vlc is my default player. It opens smoothly in windows media player as well. I willl experiment with trying to open and save on different machines and see if I can get it to save as a WAV file.

[longtale]

To clarify "play as a project file". After importing the WAV file (ctrl I), I had a recording in Audacity (able to be saved as an aup file etc). Then I pressed play to hear what I had imported.

[schulznotee]

This thread almost answered my question. I have the same problem when importing an apparently compressed .WAV file. My 20 plus minute recording taken at a recent organ concert has been successfully transfered from the recording device (Konica-Minolta Dimage Xg digital camera which records VERY well, thank you) to my computer and burned to a CD. It plays faithfully on either the computer or from the CD on a CD/DVD player.

However, when I import the (playable) .WAV file from My Music to Audacity, it plays in about 5 seconds. It is apparently highly compressed and I need to get it into real-time to be able to edit it to eliminate dead time, excessive applause, etc.

What am I missing or doing wrong?

[steve]

Assuming that you are on Windows, please do the following:

Right Click on the WAV file and select "Properties"
Take a note of the size of the file as shown on the "General" tab.
Click on the "Summary" tab, and then on the "Advanced" button.
either copy all the information that is displayed, or take a screen shot and paste it here.

You should see something similar to this for a typical wav file:

test.wav properties

test.gif (18.99 KiB) Viewed 1703 times

[schulznotee]

Steve-

My file's Properties' General page shows-
Type- Wave Sound
Size- 14.7 MB
Size on disc- 14.7

The Summary page shows-
Bit Rate- 64bps
Audio sample size- 8 bit
Channels- 1 (mono)
Audio sample rate- 8kHz
Audio format- PCM

(Sorry, I've never gotten the "picture in email" bit)

Bill

[steve]

That's weird - you say the file is 12 minutes long?

At these settings:
"Bit Rate- 64bps
Audio sample size- 8 bit
Channels- 1 (mono)
Audio sample rate- 8kHz
Audio format- PCM"

a 12 minute file should be 5.49 MB (5,760,044 bytes).

The only thing that I can think of is that there is something very non-standard about your file. If it plays in other media players then you may be able to use a format converter to convert it into a standard format that is supported by Audacity. There's a free converter called "Super" that should be able to do it (just Google for "super").

[Bob Stenson]

I upgraded to 1.2.6 and now I can't import any .wav files. Even the .wav files that I had exported with the old versions are not working. Mp3s work fine. This post looks about as close to my problem as anyone else is having. It seems like no one else is having this problem. I'm about ready to reformat my hard drive and try from scratch. Does anyone have any ideas?