[praat-users] Cannot open file "C:...wav" error

[José Joaquín Atria [e-mail] [praat-users]]

What is the error message you get? You can copy the text in the message.

It sounds like it might be a problem with hard coded paths in your experiment.

José Joaquín Atria

www.pinguinorodriguez.cl

Hi there! I was sent an experiment project from the uni but I cannot run it
wth the program. It's an experiment package with audio files in it, but
everytime I try to open it from praat an error window pops up saying it
cannot open one of the .wav files. I tried opening the file with other
players and it works perfectly ok. I tried re-downloading both praat and the
experiment folder, but nothing seems to work. Any suggestions on what else I
could do? Thank you in advance!

[Paul Boersma [e-mail] [praat-users]]

I get that quite frequently, a bunch of .wav files and one or two of them just don't work.

That's quite different from what alina_morris asked, which is why the files couldn't be found and which must be caused by a mistake with the "path" to those files in the experiment file.

If you have a "wav" file that doesn't work, please send it along, unless it's a lossy compressed format.
_____

Paul Boersma
University of Amsterdam
Linguistics
Spuistraat 210, room 303
1012VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/

[Michelle Porter [e-mail] [praat-users]]

Post by Paul Boersma ***@uva.nl [praat-users]

I get that quite frequently, a bunch of .wav files and one or two of them just don't work.

That's quite different from what alina_morris asked, which is why the files couldn't be found and which must be caused by a mistake with the "path" to those files in the experiment file.

Sorry, perhaps I misunderstood. She doesn't mention paths, though, only
that "an error window pops up saying it cannot open one of the .wav
files" and that it opens fine elsewhere. Perhaps the OP could clarify?

[Paul Boersma [e-mail] [praat-users]]

I have no idea what's causing it, the error messages tend to say something along the lines of unsupported or unrecognised file format

well, an error message that says that the file format is unsupported tends to mean that the file format is unsupported. Microsoft comes with additions to their WAV format almost every year, and Praat will support all those that don't contain a closed-source proprietary compressed format. If you have WAV-like files that Praat 6.0.05 cannot open, I really want to have an example.

figure maybe something odd in the header of these particular files that Praat doesn't like.

Praat has no feelings about headers.

Anyway, I load them into Audacity (which accepts just about anything!), and resave.

That's a non sequitur. If you cannot open a file with program A but program B does open it, it still doesn't follow that program B opens more types of files than program A does. In fact, Audacity (newest version) refuses to open CSL NSP files, which are used in several phonetic databases, while Praat happily opens them.
_____

Paul Boersma
University of Amsterdam
Linguistics
Spuistraat 210, room 303
1012VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/

[Michelle Porter [e-mail] [praat-users]]

Post by Paul Boersma ***@uva.nl [praat-users]

figure maybe something odd in the header of these particular files that Praat doesn't like.

Praat has no feelings about headers.

OK :-D Not claiming I know what's going on!

Post by Paul Boersma ***@uva.nl [praat-users]

Anyway, I load them into Audacity (which accepts just about anything!), and resave.

That's a non sequitur. If you cannot open a file with program A but program B does open it, it still doesn't follow that program B opens more types of files than program A does. In fact, Audacity (newest version) refuses to open CSL NSP files, which are used in several phonetic databases, while Praat happily opens them.

Sorry, Paul, I did not mean to imply Praat is inferior in some way - at
all! (Never!) Merely that it has been my experience that if another
program (Praat, Windows Media Player, even VLC) has issues with a file,
Audacity will usually handle it. With "just about anything" I didn't
mean different file formats, btw, I was thinking of files that have
elsewhere been reported as corrupted, or, well, unsupported (despite -
per extension - claiming to be in a common format (like .wav or .mp3).

[Antoine Auchlin [e-mail] [praat-users]]

I have no idea what's causing it, the error messages tend to say something along the lines of unsupported or unrecognised file format

well, an error message that says that the file format is unsupported tends to mean that the file format is unsupported. Microsoft comes with additions to their WAV format almost every year, and Praat will support all those that don't contain a closed-source proprietary compressed format. If you have WAV-like files that Praat 6.0.05 cannot open, I really want to have an example.

figure maybe something odd in the header of these particular files that Praat doesn't like.

Praat has no feelings about headers.

Anyway, I load them into Audacity (which accepts just about anything!), and resave.

That's a non sequitur. If you cannot open a file with program A but program B does open it, it still doesn't follow that program B opens more types of files than program A does. In fact, Audacity (newest version) refuses to open CSL NSP files, which are used in several phonetic databases, while Praat happily opens them.

Yet: opening .wav with Audacity allow you to clean out un-desired information and save it in a Praat-readable format.
Best
Antoine

_____

Paul Boersma
University of Amsterdam
Linguistics
Spuistraat 210, room 303
1012VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/
--
Antoine Auchlin
Département de linguistique
5, rue De Candolle
Université de GenÚve
CH-1211 GenÚve 4

http://www.unige.ch/lettres/linguistique/Auchlin/

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