Anyone know why Audacity won't load in certain mp3's for editing?

[snafubaby]

I load one, and it loads in immediately, and i hit play. I just hear a long screeeech sound, and the screech has different tones to it. It's like the song loaded, but it's being played at 5000mph. I just wanna amplify the volume. Thanks!!

[El Heggunte]

Maybe that MP3 has some "tags" which are confusing Audacity. Create a copy of the MP3 file, remove ALL of its tags, and try again.

[poisondeathray]

I just wanna amplify the volume.

If it's just for volume adjustment, try mp3gain . Audacity will require re-encoding, quality loss

[jagabo]

My guess is the MP3 file isn't really an MP3 file. Media players normally look inside the file to identify the container so the wrong extension doesn't fool them. Audacity (with the ffmpeg source plugin) isn't so smart. For example, I took and .AC3 file and renamed it .MP3. Audacity loaded it but the sound was garbage.

Use MediaInfo to check the container and fix the extension.

[TSJNachos]

I once had a full album of "bad" MP3 files, which confused some players, namely anything that demuxes using LAVF. These players constantly mistook the file for a PCM/Wav file. This, however, did not effect all players. For instance, Windows Media Player's default MP3 codecs worked perfectly, as did those built into the firmware of my DAP.

I was able to fix these files by remuxing them using AVIMuxGui. However, this approach has some drawbacks. For instance, you lose the ID3 tags, although they can be recopied with something like MP3Tag. Another drawback is that AMG doesn't really do a lot of batch processing, meaning you will have to spend a considerable amount of time on this.

After fixing a handful of these songs, I decided to try MP3Diags, and it did the job quite nicely.

These tacktics may or may not work for you, but at the least, they are probably worth a try.

I probably should mention these programs are Windows-based, but might still work Mac, Linux, etc. with WINE installed.

[snafubaby]

Thanks to all who submitted their suggestions. I will try and use the mentioned and see what I can come up with.

Thanks again!

[snafubaby]

I discovered that the files were video files. For some reason, the Android app i downloaded them from (from Youtube) said that i could convert them to .mp3s, but using Mediainfo, it said that they were video files. A real headscratcher. That's why Audacity wouldn't load them. I just did it the easy way by converting the files to .wav, and then used Audacity to convert to mp3.

[jagabo]

Audacity can import audio from most video files if you have the ffmpeg source plugin. And if the video file has the correct extension!

[ranchhand]

Several times I have dragged & dropped avi, flv, mov and mp4 videos into Audacity and it stripped the audio out automatically. I think I remember dropping an entire backed up movie file in and it ripped the entire movie track. Patriot Games/Harrison Ford. Not sure though.

[snafubaby]

Hi all. I discovered that the mp3's in question were in fact video files. I don't know how or what happened. I got them from an Android app that downloads youtube video. I just converted the songs to wav, and then used Audacity to convert them to mp3. It was easy. Thanks again for other suggestions.