Audacity crashs on WAVs created with Adobe Premiere Elements

[bachastain]

Using Adobe Premiere Elements, I can export an audio track to a WAV file. The WAV file is perfectly readable by other applications like the Windows Media Player, Windows Movie Maker. Any attempt to open the WAV file with Audacity, either 1.2.6 and 1.3.5, instantly causes Audacity to crash with "Audacity has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

I'm reporting it here first because 1) other players have no trouble with these WAV files, and 2) even if there is something wrong with file, a crash is not an appropriate response.

I'm hoping Audacity or someone here can help identify what is it about these wav files Audacity can't handle, and either fix Audacity or describe what is wrong.

I've attached a file called VID00004.wav. It was the smallest file I had, zipped, and contains only microphone wind noise so don't expect much, but it does crash Audacity instantly. The same file works elsewhere.

VID00004.zip

Causes Audacity to crash.

(254.22 KiB) Downloaded 55 times

Bruce.

[kozikowski]

<<<even if there is something wrong with file, a crash is not an appropriate response.>>>

We don't think so, either. That's why most of the time, it doesn't.

<<<other players have no trouble with these WAV files>>>

They're video standard files, but so are most of mine. 48000, 16-bit. Yours play perfectly in 1.2.5, 1.3.5 and QuickTime Player.

Let's reverse it. Can you play either of those?

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

Why did you Zip it?

Koz

[bachastain]

Yes, your 2 test files play perfectly here in Audacity. Only the Premeire Elements generated WAV files cause Audacity to crash.

I zipped it because 1) this forum only allows tiny files, and 2) refused to permit all WAV file types.

To make sure the zipping didn't change it, I just redownloaded it and tried it again in 1.2.6. Instant crash. Yesterday I was talking with other users of Premeire Elements and they were able to duplicate the Audacity crashes on Premeire Elements generated WAV files, just like the one I uploaded here.

Bruce.

[steve]

I've tried your file in Audacity 1.3.5 in Linux, and Audacity 1.2.6 in Windows. No problem with either.

"Audacity has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

That is not actually an error message from Audacity - it's an error message generated by Windows. (I really wish Windows did not do that - it's very misleading).

It could be that there is a problem relating to 32bit wav files and your sound card drivers. Premier Elements may not send data to your sound card in the same way that Audacity does, it may downsample data to 16 bit, whereas Audacity will try to send it at 32 bit, which may not be supported. Can you export from Elements as 16 bit?

[kozikowski]

<<<It could be that there is a problem relating to 32bit wav files>>>

What?

QuickTime INFO claims that file is 16 bit integer Little Endian, Stereo, 48000. Audacity also claims 48K 16 bit.

Koz

[steve]

Oops, sorry, my mistake

16 bit 48kHz stereo.

OK, so perhaps the 48kHz? Worth trying exporting at 44.1kHz?

[thorin]

I have the same problems (with versions 1.2.6 and 1.3.6, 1.3.7) when importing wave files that were encoded with Adobe Premiere (Adobe Media Encoder CS4 actually). The files are pretty standard, 22kHz, mono, 16bit PCM. There was another post a while ago (http://www.audacityteam.org/forum/viewt ... obe#p16945) referring to the same issue with the possible solution that it might be a problem of Audacity interpreting some strange pieces of xml code that Adobe puts at the end of the wave file.

Has someone looked into making Audacity able to deal with those files, instead of just re-encoding the files with another program?

cheers,
thorin

[steve]

Has someone looked into making Audacity able to deal with those files, instead of just re-encoding the files with another program?

In the previous thread, neither myself, or another user had problems opening the file in question. I don't know what version of Audacity the other user was using, but I use the latest 1.3 version. Have you tried using Audacity 1.3 ? (although it is described as "beta", it is pretty stable now, and has many improvements over Audacity 1.2 - you can even have both versions installed at the same time, but note that Audacity 1.3 can open projects saved in Audacity 1.2, Audacity 1.2 can not open projects that have been saved from Audacity 1.3).

Perhaps you could ask Adobe if it is possible to export standard WAV files that do not have that extra data.

[binary1230]

I found out today this is a code issue. It's fixed in the latest version of libsndfile, there are more details here: http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 712#p40712

[elDuck]

Hi, I've just hit the same problem using Audacity 1.3.5 and Premiere Elements 4. You say it is fixed in the latest libsndfile but I don't know what I have to do to get a working version of Audacity.

Can you tell me what I need to do so that I can work with exported audio from Premiere Elements 4, please?