I am running Ardour in Ubuntu Studio installed on a MacBook. There are some issues with realtime there, but I am just trying to get a basic test session up and running. I’ve got 2 tracks plus the master, and I wanted to import audio into one. When I browse to a .WAV file, and select it, I get the message, “One or more of your selected files cannot be used by Ardour”. Where it says “Soundfile Info”, it has n/a for channels, sample rate, and format, like it doesn’t recognize them as .WAV files. One of these files was created by Audacity; the other probably by Pro Tools. How can I tell why Ardour has a problem with these files, and fix it? A DAW that can’t import .WAV files is limited.
The file “/media/PPA1.2/Audio/I’m Your Moon.wav” won’t open because you also have to escape the apostroph (’) with a backslash (), just like you did for the spaces. You can also quote the entire filename, using either double or single quotes.
In your given example, where you are staring at this ‘>’ instead of the command prompt, you could get the prompt back through Control-C. (Hold the Control key, then type ‘C’.)
Maybe even easier is to use the shell’s auto-completion feature, by pressing TAB. This feature will automatically insert backslashes as needed. You may have to provide hints by typing the “next” letter in case the system encounters similar filenames.
I don’t really know why you got the “No such file” error message, but probably the zip drive was unmounted somehow – meaning the system cannot read files from it anymore. The error of course means the file is simply not there. Disconnect and reconnect the drive and it should work again.
All this has nothing at all to do with the quality or legal status of the files at hand. Good luck!
Ardour imports .WAV files, and has done so for thousands of users. There are (and continue) to be many applications that write illegal WAV files, and Ardour may not handle them. Ardour relies on a software library called “libsndfile” which is a cross-platform, portable way to use audio files in many different formats. It is generally very good at identifying issues with audio files.
Your best way to get an idea of what might be wrong is to use a tool that comes with libsndfile, called “sndfile-info”. You run it from a command line:
and take a look at the output. If sndfile-info can handle it, so can Ardour. If it can’t, it should provide some detailed, low-level clue as the what the problem with the file is. Feel free to reply with more info once you have run sndfile-info on both files.
pad@Studio909:~$ ls /media/PPA1.2/Audio
/media/PPA1.2/Audio/CominRoundNoMelody.wav
/media/PPA1.2/Audio/I’m Your Moon.wav
pad@Studio909:~$ sndfile-info /media/PPA1.2/Audio/CominRoundNoMelody.wav
Version : libsndfile-1.0.17
Error : Not able to open input file /media/PPA1.2/Audio/CominRoundNoMelody.wav.
File : /media/PPA1.2/Audio/CominRoundNoMelody.wav
System error : No such file or directory.
pad@Studio909:~$ sndfile-info /media/PPA1.2/Audio/I’m Your Moon.wav
The output is the same if I enter the last one as /I’m\ Your\ Moon.wav, to account for the spaces. When I use ls, the shell prints the file path in red. Looks like ls can find the files, but sndfile-info can’t? Can you understand what’s going on?
I did not mean to say that Ardour can never import ANY .WAV files at all, but I was disappointed that I couldn’t import the ones I tried. I was afraid I’d have all kinds of trouble importing. I was able later to find a file and import it, so I’m satisfied I can do it. Those files that failed must not be valid; I thought I had been playing them with Audacious, but it must have been different files of the same songs. They won’t play now.
Here is the output of sndfile-info:
pad@Studio909:~$ ls /media/PPA1.2/Audio
/media/PPA1.2/Audio/CominRoundNoMelody.wav
/media/PPA1.2/Audio/I’m Your Moon.wav
pad@Studio909:~$ sndfile-info /media/PPA1.2/Audio/I’m Your Moon.wav
Then I can’t get the command prompt back. It does the same thing if I account for the spaces with \ .
Error : Not able to open input file /media/PPA1.2/Audio/CominRoundNoMelody.wav.
File : /media/PPA1.2/Audio/CominRoundNoMelody.wav
System error : No such file or directory.
pad@Studio909:~$
So I don’t know what’s with these files. Is there a way to make illegal files into legal ones? For I’m Your Moon (by Jonathan Coulton (CC)) I imported the MP3 into Audacity, then exported it as a .wav.
I probably got the other one from Pro Tools. I started with a MIDI file, then assigned software instruments to it, and printed the audio to a track.