Freesound Forums

For the last several months, I have been unable to upload WAV, FLAC, or AIF. The file(s) appear to be uploading OK - I get a progress bar and it takes about the expected amount of time. But once the upload is (apparently) finished, I get this message:

Uploaded file format not supported or not an audio file.

MP3 files will upload OK.

To create and/or convert files, I use Sound Forge Pro 12 or Mixbus 32C-8 on Windows 10.

Any ideas as to a solution or workaround? I know this topic was discussed a few years ago, but I could not see where there was any resolution.

Thanks for any help.

David M. Boothe, CAS (ret.)
LakewoodSound

I occasionally encounter files that don't play or take several minutes to begin playing despite being small in filesize. I've been trying to help a friend solve that for some time so that we can exchange musical ideas more easily.

I'd be curious to look at one of the affected files, just to see if anything obvious is different about it. Maybe the bit depth or sample rate are out of range of what Freesound can handle, or maybe there's something unreadable in the file header.

I can try a process of elimination where I re-export an affected sound with different specs each time until I get one that will upload without issue. If you'd like to commence that, please privately message me a link to one or more affected files. You can upload them to Google Drive, SoundCloud, sendspace, or vocaroo.

- Z.

Thanks for the reply and the offer to help.

I'll upload a few files to my Google Drive later today and send you some links.

I did check a few headers in Sound Forge, (don't know how to do that in hex) but did not see anything problematic. Another set of eyes and ears would certainly be helpful.

Thanks again.

dB

Problem solved thanks to a suggestion by strangehorizon.

The problem was my browser. Switching to another browser allowed everything to work fine.

dB

Glad you solved it. I still don't know why some output files refuse to work with things like BandLab and Discord, though. I thought that issue might be the same issue you had.

It seems especially prevalent with very old WAV files. For example, the sounds from the point-and-click adventure, Beavis and Butthead's Virtual Stupidity, had to be converted to a more modern WAV format before I could use them. I remember it being a pain to find a software that could do it. Acid WAV, and any other format with embedded data or metadata, also seem to wreck certain software. Even when they don't wreck it, they sometimes have arbitrarily long durations, like in the thousands of years. I don't know why - those datapoints should be invisible to the way software interprets the sound data itself.

Ah well, I'll solve that one another day!