I have been using Audacity for a variety of audio processing needs for some years now, and until lately I have been quite satisified. But lately it seems to have developed a hyper-sensitivity to errors and refusing to load files from my podcasts. I like to use Audacity to process those podcast files as described in my article “Preparing Podcasts for Listening“, and when those files won’t load that presents a problem. Among the errors I have gotten is a complaint about Bad Huffman Code, or Bad File Length, or Forbidden Bitrate Value. Now it is entirely possible that these are real errors of some kind, but are they really bad enough to just refuse to load the files? I think not. In fact, some online searching has disclosed that Audacity decided to enable error checking in libmad, which is the decoding library, which it had not done before. But they realized that it was picking up a lot of really minor stuff, so in the next version they may relax the error checking. I hope so, though I note that some of this information is from 2020.

My work around is to use online File Converters, which load the files just fine. Then I convert from MP3 to OGG, for instance, download the converted file, and then let my Audacity script run on the converted file, which it does perfectly. I have found a couple I like, though there is no shortage of converters out there. The two I have used are Convertio and Online Audio Converter. They are both fast and easy, and I note that both have now added some simple Video Editing tools. You wouldn’t use them for really serious work, but for combining two clips or cutting out footage they would probably work just fine.

 Save as PDF