CP4 unable to decode and import the selected wav/mp3 file

[IsabellaR]

I am trying to import a .wav file into a project and get an error message 'unable to decode and import the selected wav/mp3 file'.

I have tried the solution huan_miguel posted a week ago for someone with the same problem.

http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/03/adobe_captivate_4_installatio n.html

executed all the steps described in this link.

Unfortunately, the problem is still there.

Any other solution?

[RodWard]

You might try saving the WAV file at a lower bitrate.  Try 16 bit audio. If you don't have an audio editor, try downloading a trial version of Adobe Soundbooth.

[Captiv8r]

Or many folks swear by Audacity?

Click here to visit the Audacity site

Cheers... Rick

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[IsabellaR]

Hello RodWard,

I don't know anything about bitrates. I have a .wav of 10,5 MB now. Is that to big for Captivate?

I bought this audio, hired a profesional voice to add narration to a project. Would it help if I cut this file in little peaces or is it better to lower the bitrate. And how do I know what the bitrate is now?

Hope you can help

[RodWard]

You're probably going to need to do both.

Although Captivate can certainly accept a 10 meg audio file, you would need to add it to the movie and then synchronise the slides to the audio. Chopping the audio file up and adding the relevant bits to each slide has both advantages and disadvantages.  It's easier to control the playback synchronisation when you divide up the audio, but it's more work.

Take a look at this graphic from SoundBooth when I export an audio file recorded in Captivate 5:

Notice that it shows the bitrate of the Captivate WAV file as being 16 bit.  This is quite a low bitrate.  You can go as high as 32 bit in SoundBooth, however, in my experience, when you try to import a WAV into Captivate that is over 16 bit you will encounter issues.  Cp just doesn't seem to like it.

If you want to learn more about bit rates in multimedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate

Suffice to say, you need to find out what the current bit rate of the audio file is, and if necessary, save it as 16 bit for Captivate.  For this, you will require some kind of audio editing software.

You can try using Audacity as someone else suggested: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/  and try exporting the file out as 16 bit.

However, if you are going to be doing quite a bit of this type of work, I would suggest you invest in Adobe Soundbooth, or something of that ilk.  You'll enjoy the experience more.

[IsabellaR]

Hello Rodward,

Because I also got an error message when trying to work with audicity, I contacted the vendor I received the audio from, because I though that maybe the file was corrupt. They told me that it was a 48000 hz and 16 bits file. They converted it to 44000 hz and now it is working fine.

[Captiv8r]

Hello again, someone else again here...

Another fairly simple thing to try is to open the Windows Sound Recorder (crossing fingers and hoping you are a Windows XP user - I don't think Sound Recorder survived the trip into Windows 7)

In Sound Recorder you simply open the file, then click File > Save As. Next, click the Change button. But don't make any changes. Just click OK and save the file back out. See if that corrects the issue.

In Captivate 4 and earlier we would see this happen on occasion and the steps above would correct the issue. What would happen was that somehow folks would create WAV files with MP3 encoding. Captivate likes PCM encoding for WAV. That's what the Save As bit does. Saves in PCM encoding.

Perhaps give that a go and see what happens.. Rick

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[IsabellaR]

Hi Rick (or should I call you someone else),

I tried your solution. Looked so simple and I like simple solutions. I have Windows XP so no problem there. However, I stil get the same message when I tried to import the audio file again .

I also tried Audacity, but then I got the message that a problem occurred and Audacity had to close (and it did). I tried another .wav and .mp3 and there was no problem there.

[Sivakumar_Nagarajan]

Hi

Can you let us know which software was used to create this WAV file? May be we can also try to create a 10Mb WAV file using the same software and see what goes wrong while importing into Captivate.

If you create another WAV file (may be a smaller one) using the same tool, are you able to import it in Captivate?

Is it possible to share the problem WAV file(s) with us?

Cheers

Siva