messed up music file

January 26, 2009 4:29 AM

Wave file gone bad

A long time ago, I arranged and recorded a piece of music, which I have saved as a .wav file. Its the right size, but when I play it in any audio player, there is no output. Either it refuses to play, or plays without producing any sound, depending on the player. Evidently, something is wrong.

I'd really like to fix this, since I remember very little of the arrangement, other that I really liked it. How do I go about this?

posted by sidr to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Download a copy of Audacity and see what's actually in the file.
posted by gjc at 4:32 AM on January 26, 2009

It might be some unusual bit depth or sampling rate -- sometimes players or other software can't handle 32bit wavs for example. It might also be a misnamed aiff or something. If you're on OS X or linux, try typing at the command line (i.e. in terminal) "file filename.wav", and it should tell you if this is so. I also second trying to load it in audacity, it should handle anything. Can you reload it in whatever software you used to record it originally?
posted by advil at 5:39 AM on January 26, 2009

To add to gjc...I've had this happen too and what you need to do is "import as RAW". It's possible your WAV file was encoded at a really weird bit rate and when that happens a lot of players can't play it. Or the file may have had a corrupted bit. But if you import it as RAW then Audacity will be able to make heads or tails of it I would think.
posted by arniec at 6:29 AM on January 26, 2009