Embarrassment because I notified the website owner, and now I think it may be my own error.

I have been using my foobar2000 as my default player for a few weeks, but I am still new. Of course I have my WAV files associated with foobar as default. I have played many WAV files, and intermixed WAV and mp3 files, with no trouble.

There is a very, very good website for learning Spanish. I downloaded some audio files from the site, which were in WAV format. But when I tried to play them, foobar came up by default, as it is supposed to, but reported this:
____________________________________

Unable to open item for playback (Unsupported format or corrupted file):
"E:\ABC Spanish\Laura Lawless\Test\comoestas.wav"
____________________________________

And so I contacted the site producer/owner. Somewhat to my astonishment, she quickly replied, and said she had re-uploaded all her audio files in response, but would I supply her with more info.

Well, I decided to first check out one disturbing thought. So I re-assigned WAV files back to WMP, and, a bit to my horror (considering she had done all that work), WMP played the files flawlessly.

I re-assigned them back to foobar. Same results as before. Foobar is not happy with the files. Now, I have more homework to do. Whether foobar is having trouble with EVERY SINGLE FILE, or just a LOT of the files, I don't know yet.

If you want to try for yourself, the beginners' Spanish audio files I'm speaking of can be tried here:
http://www.elearnspanishlanguage.com/vocab.../greetings.html

I believe I was having a failure rate of about 40%. In theory, none of these WAV files should fail.

The rather horrific fact remains that I may be doing something very, very stupid.

Thanks for any further insights.

EDITED:Forget this. My suggestion won't solve.

PS.: Try using WMP and see if works, if works, fine, if not, it's a file problem

If you're using a beta version of 0.9.x , update to 0.9.2 final

Some previous versions had trouble with certain types of WAVs

I can reproduce the problem with 0.9.2 final. Loading the wav and saving it in GoldWave seems to solve the problem.

If you drag and drop files onto foobar2000, you can easily spot which files are problematic. Just look at the song length; if it shows up as a question mark, then it probably won't play.

Thanks, guys.

—Why would "some" WAV files incur this problem? Is there a difference between one WAV file and another WAV file?

Simply put, a .wav file consists of at least a "RIFF header" and "PCM data." There's more than one way to write the header, and there's more than one kind of data that can be used in a .wav file. The header describes the data; if the description is wrong, then there might be problems.

Problems like yours can occur if the RIFF header is somehow wrong, or if foobar2000 is making a mistake. I don't know which is the case in your case.

Did problems come from a corrupted header or from a different codec in the WAV codec?

Maybe WMP automatically supposes that the Windows Waveform is PCM /44.1 kHz / Stereo data, and that foobar2000 doesn't...

Maybe someone with more wav header / audio codec experience could take a look...

comoestas.wav was a 22kHz 8bit unsigned mono PCM .wav or something. It's not ADPCM or anything exotic.

It works without problems in foobar 0.8.3, tested it with

hola.wav
bitrate = 176
samplerate = 22050
channels = 1
codec = PCM
bitspersample = 8

dbPoweramp says it is
PCM WaveFormatEx Header
no Idea if that's normal

Thanks for the page, want to learn a bit spanish anyway

Hollunder, I was slow to notice you said "0.8.3". I'm using 0.9.2, and I went searching for a (nonexistent) "0.9.3" version!

Hmm. Well, I have been around foobar only a short time. If I went from 0.9.2 to 0.8.3, would I be losing out on some other important improvements? That's a fairly big version jump—or "downgrade", as M$ would charmingly call it—but these are important files to me.

This seems to me to be analogous to using Linux or OpenOffice. A user might feel they are better, so it's an unhappy moment when they don't do something just right. "Oh, so THAT'S why 95% of the people stay with M$." But these other programs—Linux, OO, foobar—may nonetheless be better, more intelligent, more capable programs. [It's easier to eat meat (particularly in restaurants) than to be a vegetarian; but vegetarianism might still be the better way of living, even so.]

I really don't want to use WMP. Seems to me that foobar is generally much better, but I guess I've stumbled across something foobar isn't up on. I'll set up foobar 0.8.3 unless I receive a caution that that would be a bad idea.

Thanks again. Haha! Glad you like the Spanish site. Yes, it is a good place to learn Spanish. Very good.

Those files were written by broken software (invalid cbSize part of WAVEFORMATEX structure). I can make them work, but it will be less problematic for you in long run to rewrite them using some software that reads them than to keep broken versions and change software you use to play them.

Ah HA!! Thank you so much, Peter! So there IS a problem with the WAV files, and foobar is vindicated, right? Well, that makes me feel somewhat better. The lady running the website seems to be a very nice person, as well as being knowledgable, so I felt pretty bad that I'd caused her to upload her files all over again. And they still didn't work properly in foobar

So I have it right, now? And that's good, too, becuz I was looking all over the place for foobar 0.8.3. Foobar seems very much to NOT want 0.8.3 downloaded any more. I looked at the changelog at
http://www.foobar2000.org/download.html
and I could see that there have been important changes; so no doubt foobar is shy about people using earlier versions.

Okay, I'll convert the files. Oops. Um—this is my tech limit, here—you said "rewrite", not convert. If I converted these flawed WAV files to any other file type (probably mp3), I'd still have the flaws in the new filetype, wouldn't I?

So—uh— I guess I'd better learn how to write a file. Gee, I hope I have enough brain-RAM.

Again, Peter, thanks lots.
______________________________

Am now reading the wiki articles, including
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...io_format_guide

Peter probably just meant you should "fix" the files using Goldwave or another application. I highly doubt you're going to need to do any format conversion, programming or anything like that!

Oh, okay, dv1989; thanks. I'm overwhelmed by the size of this can of worms I've opened! I'll try Goldwave, and see how that works out.

There is little choice left for me: I must live another five hundred years. I suppose five centuries will teach me that I need fifty centuries beyond that.

Every detail of computer work opens universes of knowledge. Every detail of nature opens universes upon universes. Every nuance of feeling or wonder of every moment of our exploration opens universes.

I am learning so much; and I know so very, very little. I can't be mortal—I just can't take the time to be.

Just fix the files and worry about the rest later!

The worst part is that these sounds are actually legal WAV files (MSDN says that for WAVE_FORMAT_PCM, the cbSize member should be ignored). And that means foobar2000 has to support this file type (as these may not be the only files which have this problem).

However, according to the published Multimedia Programming Interface Document, a cbSize should not be present at all in a PCM encoded wav file! MSDN and riffmci.rtf disagreeing with each other! It's for reasons like these that adhering to standards is like , and that I'll never be able to write a wave parser.

Hmm... the riffmci.rtf document says that apps should account for extra unknown fields and ignore them. Since a cbSize member shouldn't be present in a PCM wav file, does that mean you should treat the field as an ignored member?