Unable to re-link audio: "The importer reported a generic error."

[reliken]

Two months ago, my computer died and I lost a hard drive. I've since gotten a new computer, reinstalled my programs, recovered my lost files, etc.

Today I started to pick up work on a project I haven't touched since early April. Since I'm running a new system, Premiere first prompted me to convert my project (which was on the last version of Premiere, 12.0) to make it compatible with the latest version of Premiere (12.1), and then I had to relink all of my files. Almost everything relinked perfectly... except for four .WAV files (they're two sets of two, alternate channels).

When I try to link those files, which are located in the same directory subfolder as the rest of my files which linked correctly, I get the message "The importer reported a generic error." If I try to manually drag those files into my timeline, I get a red "no" symbol. When I try to manually import them using the file->import buttons, it says "unsupported format or damaged file."

These files worked perfectly when I last worked on this project two months ago; they're still sliced up and marked just the way I left them. The files themselves are also just fine - they play in VLC Media Player. These files sync with video I already captured and have already edited. What's going on here? Is there anything I can do? I've tried saving/restarting Premiere, I've tried moving the files in question to different directories and attempting to re-import from there, nothing's working.

That's pretty much all the information I have, with one potentially important quirk. The file I was originally trying to edit here was a video file that had two separate channels of audio attached. Whenever I would try to import it into Premiere, though, it would only import one of the two channels. I tried a bunch of fix suggestions but nothing would work. I ended up using software to rip the audio out of the video files, split into a separate file per channel, imported those files in, and synced them with the video. My file names are Source File.mp4, Source File st0.wav, and Source File st1.wav. A "Source File.avi" was created by the software I used to rip the audio files, but I'm not using the avi in Premiere, I'm using the original mp4. The two unlinked audio files, when I click "link media," show me the correct clip name (st0/st1.wav respectively) but tell me they're looking for a file name that ends in .avi. I can link them to the .avi file successfully, but the enabled files are garbled and unusable.

Especially since the audio files still work, and they were working within Premiere just fine two months ago, this is quite frustrating. Any tips/suggestions would be much appreciated; thank you.

[reliken]

Maybe midnight wasn't the best time to post this; it's already buried in dozens of other posts. Bringing it back to the top...

[reliken]

Surely someone on the Internet can tell me why my perfectly-functioning completely-playable .wav files cannot be imported into Adobe Premiere.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi reliken,

Is it a QuickTime wrapped .wav file? That may be at the heart of the issue. Dropped support for QuickTime 7 era formats and codecs Let us know if the file works in an earlier version of the application.

Thanks,
Kevin

[excited_Genie16B8]

Is it a QuickTime wrapped .wav file?

Wouldn't that still be an .mov and not a .wav?

[reliken]

I tried running in 12.1, 12.01, and 12.0.0, no luck with any of them.

[reliken · Accepted solution]

I was able to solve this using VLC Media player's ability to convert media.

VLC: Media-> Convert/Save -> load up my two problematic .wav files -> convert: (audio profile: WAV codec, 320 kbps bitrate, 48000 hz sample rate).

Output was .WAV files that could link with my project audio. I technically lost a tiny bit of quality, but it's imperceptible to my ear.