So I’ve found myself a welcoming beginners-to-session playing “session”. Last week, with permission, I used my camera to record it. The camera has a function to record sound to .wav files, and it’s less fiddly to manage the files from here than from the MP3 player.
These .wav files can be played with windows-media-player and my MP3 player’s software. But when I try to open them with Audacity, it just opens a short screech (9 seconds worth), instead of the 1/2 hour of sound that I’m expecting.
I did de-install some software lately, so had horrid thoughts about maybe I’d gone to far. But audacity is still able to open other .wav files - and I noticed that it says they are 32 bit, whereas it says the ones from the camera are 64 bit. So I’m wondering if this is the problem.
Anyway, I’m really keen to edit these, and strip out just the tunes that I want to learn so I can play them a zillion times … as you do. Any suggestions about other software that I could try?
Audacity will only work in a 32 bit environment, so you will be in trouble if the wav-file you’re trying to load is 64 bit,-so yes,- this might be the problem.
-Does audacity present you with a dialogbox giving you the option of scaling down to 32 bit before loading the file?
If the above doesn’t work, there is a way around the problem. Open up audacity and prepare it for a recording session. Then open up windows media player and play the 64 bit file from your camera. Now,-record the playback in Windows media player with audacity using line out or whatever as the sound source.
This is not an optimum solution, but at least it will do the job.
You could use a program to change the format of the wav file
before opening it with audacity. There are several. Here’s one
that came up after a google search:
Sorry for wasting your time Mary, I researched it too quickly and misread an article I found. You can get audacity working in 64bit by compiling the latest CVS code yourself. This was mentioned in an article about a sound orientated Linux distribution. I assumed as I was skim reading the article that by unstable he meant the 1.3.3 version and not the latest development code.
By all means try this if you feel confident enough. Although it will be relatively complicated.
If you don’t want to try evenstr’s suggestion, emtor’s suggestion will work, as long as you choose ‘what u hear’ or ‘wave’ (with an Soundblaster audigy2 sound card). If you have a different sound card, it may well be called ‘line out’ as emtor says.
I like the cunning idea of re-recording via the computer playing .. but don’t have a suitably quiet place to do it at the moment (moving to a new city, looking for a job before I get a flat, so staying in a hostel for not, urg!)
At this stage, rather than spending $ for a converter, I think I’ll just wait for Thursday night to roll around again, and this time record with my MP3 player, which I know does make 32-bit files.
Use a cord with a male plug on each end. Plug one into the
headphone jack and one into the line in (or, failing that microphone
jack), and you don’t need a quiet place, since the sound travels safely
through the wire.
The converting program I linked to is free for 30 days… just use it
once and delete the program. Then you can use your mp3 player the
rest of the time…
I use an open-source program (which IS free) called “sox”, but it’s
not very easy to set up if you’re not an experienced computer person
(and do not have a hacker in aquaintance).
But, if you want to try it: http://sox.sourceforge.net/
