A glitch in my freeware!

September 21, 2007 10:34 PM

Whenever I transfer the audio from a video file into the freeware program Audacity, I get brief, loud patches of white noise every few seconds, as well as a weird sort of cycling white noise in the background (the rest of the file is normal). Is there anything I can do to get rid of this? Should I use a different program? (preferably a free one, like Audacity.)

I've tried wma, wmv and mpg files, and the same thing always happens.

posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Are you putting the video files directly into Audacity? I understand it can do this, but it's probably not very good at it.

Have you tried using something like Mplayer to strip the audio to a WAV or MP3 first?

It's command-line, but I've never had it fail.

Instructions here.
Download here.
posted by Jimbob at 3:42 AM on September 22, 2007

Oh I should note, those instructions seem to apply just to ripping raw MP3 data from files. If you want to force it to output as a PCM Wav file, try this command line:

mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:file=output.wav videofile.mpg

Where, obviously, output.wav is where the audio will end up, and videofile.mpg is the video you want to rip.
posted by Jimbob at 3:47 AM on September 22, 2007

I just record the audio in real time as I play the video. YMMV.
posted by evilcolonel at 5:56 AM on September 22, 2007

If you're recording (rather than importing) the audio, as evilcolonel is, then you might be seeing clipping, or electrical noise from your computer's components being picked up by the sound card. The best solution then is to use a program to extract the audio track from the video instead.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:24 AM on September 22, 2007

Check that your input is though the sound card ("stereo mix", not through the microphone input. If I use the latter, I end up recording the fan noise as well the desired file.
posted by OlderThanTOS at 8:01 PM on September 22, 2007