Trying to edit a home video.  I wan't to include sound effects from my personal collection (.wav). I can see all the files but some won't play in Studio 12.1.  All sounds play perfectly in Windows Movie Maker, though.  What should I look into to solve this?

 

It might be worth comparing the properties of the files that work with Studio with those that don't. In Widows, right-click and select Properties. Under Sumary you can see the Sample size and rate. It's possible that Studio has an issue with some sizes.

You should be able to convert the files with something like Audacity.

Thanks.  The files from my personal collection that DO play in Studio are all at a rate of 88kbps.  The ones that do NOT play are at 20kbps.  Next step: conversion to 88kbps, right?  How is it done?  I read somewhere that conversion increases the file size so I wouldn't do it for everything at the same time.  Only when needed for my projects.

I read about Audacity.  Will this take care of the conversion?  Does Vista provide any alternative to perform this conversion?

 

Sorry for the slow reply.

If you haven't already found a solution, Windows Movie Maker should be able to do it. Load an audio file, the output it as a file for your computer. In the XP version you have a choice of formats, some of them audio only, with a choice of bitrates. I assume that the Vista version offers the same features.

Thanks, I've been looking up and down the www and couldn't find anything.  However, your idea did the trick.  This is what worked in my Vista.  Like you said: Go to Windows Movie Maker and load the audio file in question to the movie timeline.  Then, I "published" the movie to "this computer" and gave it a name, location to save into and clicked Next.  On the next screen, I  chose  "Best quality" settings and clicked "Publish".  I ended up with a 156 kbps Windows Media Audio file that Pinnacle accepted and played nicely.

 Of course, this method adds more steps to the process, but for my purposes, it beats having to download and install additional software in my computer. 

You've been very helpful. 

I would like to add my S12 experience here with audio files if I might.  I had some problems with a few MP3s that just wouldn't work in S12. They were encoded at 92 Kb/s and just wouldn't work. I re-encoded them with Audacity at 128 Kb/s and they worked well after that.

assiral:

 I read somewhere that conversion increases the file size so I wouldn't do it for everything at the same time. 

I'm not sure how much the file would increase if I encoded to WMA, but my re-encoding from 92 to 128  increased my file size by 25%, FYI.

Moving to Make Movie from the Studio Family section .