wav file glitches

[bob1941]

Chirstina - You're right. Our site can't handle .asx files and the webmaster isn't interested in changing that site portocol. Not to worry though. I tried some Roy Orbison .wma song files on our alumni site and they worked beautifully. They not only provided better quality sound than .wav files of equivalent size, but they seemed to open faster. Thanks for leading me by the hand in that direction.

Razgo - Thanks for the post. I uninstalled and downloaded the latest dmc the day before I made my initial post on this forum. I too thought that might take care of it. Unfortunately, it didn't. As I mentioned in a previous post, I can rip to .wma without encountering the problem, but I can't seem to rip to compressed .wav or convert .wav without getting the skips/dead spots.

Unfortunately, I have tons of .wav files which I would now like to convert to .wma for posting on our site. I really don't want to have to go back and start over with those songs. If I can't get the bug worked out of my dmc, I suppose I've have to use Total Recorder which has a feature similar to the dBpoweramp Professional. BUT, to do that I have to play the .wavs through my sound card to capture and convert them to .wma. I'd much rather use the speedy and versatile dmc if I can eliminate the glitch.

[Spoons]

Re: wav file glitches

i split this post out from the other thread as the real problem was getting lost in the other thread.

[ChristinaS]

Re: wav file glitches

Chirstina - You're right. Our site can't handle .asx files and the webmaster isn't interested in changing that site portocol.

With all due respect to your webmaster, unless your server is running Windows, I'll have to say he/she doesn't know the job too well, or is unwilling to make the effort.

The following applies to Unix/Linux webservers using Apache (the typical web environment).

I am by no means an experienced webmaster myself, but I do know that you can add MIME types to a website. There's nothing special about .asx files, except that the MIME type has to be defined. If there's no tool (or the webmaster is not willing to empower you to use it), and your website server is running Unix (not Windows), you can set up a file called .htaccess and upload it to your root folder (or to the folder with the audio files) and that will take care of adding missing MIME types, just for that folder and anything below it. It's no great mystery. I have done this myself many times, on sites hosted for free where I'd have no special control panel or tools at my disposal. In rare cases you cannot upload an .htaccess file to a site, I doubt that would be the case there.


In fact I have a stock .htaccess file that I keep handy just for situaitons like this. You may not need all the entires in it, but it doesn't hurt to have them there:

AddType video/x-ms-asf asf asx
AddType audio/x-ms-wax wax
AddType video/x-ms-wvx wvx
AddType audio/x-ms-wma wma 
AddType video/x-ms-wmv wmv

Copy and paste into Notepad these lines as is and save the file as htaccess.txt . Then upload it to the proper folder on the web site and rename it there to .htaccess . This is because usually Windows won't let you name a file just that, that's all. Otherwise it can merrily be called .htaccess right on your PC.

As I said, this is for Unix servers running Apache.

Under Windows, the procedure is more complicated, requiring pehaps registry changes. But then it's also quite possible that those MIME types are already defined in Windows, since we are after all dealing with Windows Media Player native types.

[bob1941]

Re: wav file glitches

Christina - Yes, the folks who host our site are not real well staffed, sort of set in their ways - and maybe a little tight with the purse strings. lol They need more server capacity too. Over the holidays one of their main servers went down and the site was closed for all practical purposes. It's running again now, but verrry slooowly.

Anyway, I've copied your last post for reference. Thank you very much. I really don't know off hand if our site runs Unix or windows, but I can find out.

Since no one can get a handle on the glitch I presented - at least not yet - I'm going to start converting some of my wavs over to wma and see how many times I encounter the glitch during the conversions. If I see a correlation between the glitch and the size/quality of wav I'm converting, I'll let you know.

Has Spoon seen this thread yet?

[ChristinaS]

Re: wav file glitches

Has Spoon seen this thread yet?

No idea. I hope he'll see it soon or we'll never get to the bottom of this :D

[Spoons]

Re: wav file glitches

the wav files. are they all compressed? and are you converting to same as source frequency? can you provide a link for us to download one of these compressed wav files?

[bob1941]

Re: wav file glitches

Razgo - I've downloaded most of my wavs from various song sites over the years. Some are better quality than others. All are compressed. Files sizes vary from about 400kbs to 800 kbs. I've always had a problem (skips/drops) using dmc to convert/compress wavs to the 24 Kbit/s @ 12,000 Hz @ 3KB/s setting, but converting to the 32Kbit/s @ 12,000Hz @ 4KB/s worked quite smoothly.

However, what really bothers me now is the fact that I'm also finding a glitch when I RIP to different compressed wav settings and often I get several skips/drops.

I would be happy to send you a typical wav with a skip in it if you'd like to give a listen. Just say the word and tell me where to send it. I'm not sure I completely understand your question about same as source frequency conversion, but I doubt that I am. Most of my conversions are to a lower file size (more compression), but a few conversions are a feeble attempt to get a slightly better quality of sound from an existing file. I know that's unlikely, but I've tried on occasion anyway.

Bob