The content of these files are unreadable - audio

michandjohn · Post by **michandjohn** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 8:56 pm

Hi,
Had a noisy video clip. I extracted the audio as WMA and asked a colleague to clean it up. When you play it in the preview panel, no problems. As soon as you try to put it on the timeline (mic or music) a message box comes up saying "the content of these files are unreadable" and it doens't allow the clip to drop into place. It's a wma file and plays fine on any audio program. Solution?
Ta

DVDDoug · Post by **DVDDoug** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 9:24 pm

I don't know what's wrong, but try using XRECODE (FREE*) to convert the WMA to (uncompressed) WAV. Or, if you have an audio editor you can us that to convert the file. Or, you can ask your colleague for a WAV file.

For future reference:
The less-compressed audio or video formats, are less likely to cause trouble.

And, these are lossy compression formats... When you open a compressed file to edit (or to "clean it up") it has to be de-compressed. Then when you re-save the file, that's an additional lossy compression step. The same is true if you convert from one lossy format to a different lossy format... multiple lossy compression steps. So whenever possible, compress once to your desired format.

* The old version (which you can still find) was free. XRECODE II is $15 USD.

michandjohn · Post by **michandjohn** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 9:34 pm

Thanks,
It appears the audio is 32bit and VS only accepts up to 24bit. Compressing it to an mp3 (16bit) solved the problem

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 12:00 pm

Hi

You can use video Studio to create a sound file of your project.
Add a video file to the timeline¡XShare Create Sound File. Creates Wav files