Wav audio files intermittent problem

[woody1]

Must be summit about the format, but no idea what. Far too many of them to go through conversions even if I knew what to do.

Have you tried playing them through anything else? Smart phone, HiFi, TV etc?

Might be worth trying a few different online wav players to see if you can find anything that will play them.

Next time it happens, it might be worth trying restarting the Windows Audio service. This might just save you having to do a full reboot every time.

[woody1]

PS. if restarting the Audio service got around the problem, then you could do this through a command line in a batch file on the desktop which you could double-click whenever it started playing up.

Not ideal but maybe a work-around you could live with.

[Martin@AS Financial]

Something else you could try would be to use wetransfer to send the file to your email. You can then download the MP3 / Wav direct to your phone so at least this way you will always have access if it wont play on your computer.

[xoggoth]

I'll try that restart thing. Cheers woody. Too many files for that to be a practical option Martin, but thanks.

[woody1]

I'll try that restart thing.

NB. to restart the service from the command line, need to run these as Administrator:

c:\>net stop AudioSrv
c:\>net start AudioSrv

[xoggoth]

Ta woody. Already done that, didn't make any difference unfortunately.

[WTFH]

More stupid questions from me:

If you open a file now and it plays badly, then you wait half an hour will it play OK, or do you need to wait until the next day for it to play OK?
Do you ever get a file that plays OK the first time, and then half an hour later it doesn't play OK?
Does it make a difference how long after your computer has restarted as to whether it plays OK or not?
What version of Windows are you running and what spec is your computer?
What anti-virus are you running?

[sadkingbilly]

Cheers both. It's an external USB recorder. The problem, when it happens, applies to all wav files. Other audio formats, MP3 etc, play fine in the same players unless converted from wav. No problems with anything else at all, audio or video. No other sound problems generally.

try checking your recording levels? your track could sound quiet because there is too much of a difference between the volume of the loudest parts and the average volume of the whole track.
you might need a compressor/limiter filter, or maybe just pump up the record volume to just below clipping?

[xoggoth]

More stupid questions from me:

If you open a file now and it plays badly, then you wait half an hour will it play OK, or do you need to wait until the next day for it to play OK?
Do you ever get a file that plays OK the first time, and then half an hour later it doesn't play OK?
Does it make a difference how long after your computer has restarted as to whether it plays OK or not?
What version of Windows are you running and what spec is your computer?
What anti-virus are you running?

Not stupid, relevant. Yes to first two. 3 - don't think so. Its' Windows 10, apart from standard MS thing I've got Malware Bytes but it isn't showing anything relevant in the logs.

Ta saddy but would have thought that would affect a file at all times. Same file is ok sometimes, not other times.

[woody1]

This is a weird one.

So, if you reboot, the problem goes away immediately. But it also goes away if you just wait a while.

To pick up on WTFH's question, how long is a while?
1) few minutes
2) about an hour
3) several hours