playing .wav files

[geekdna]

Court hearings are recorded in .wav files we can get copies of on CDs. But
we can't find a program that plays them. The whole codec thing is over my
head and more trouble than I want to deal with. Is it a Vista thing? Are wav
files no longer compatible? The old recorder program used to record and play
them. I can't find anything that simple anymore. Any help out there?

 

[geekdna]

Nope, says the required codec is missing, but not which one.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Nothing's changed as far as support for the .wav format goes. They're
natively supported and played by Windows Media Player.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
Vote for my shoe: http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Nil]

Nope, says the required codec is missing, but not which one.

All versions of Windows support standard WAV files out of the box, no
extra codecs are required. It seems that yours is not a standard WAV
file. You're going to have to go back to the source and ask them
exactly what format the file is.

 

[geekdna]

Great! I will do that. I thought a .wav was a .wav. Thanks!

 

[Nil]

Great! I will do that. I thought a .wav was a .wav. Thanks!

Wav files can be of almost any sample rate or frequency, they can be
compressed in various ways, and they can hold multiple channels. There
are the most standard forms, such as "CD quality (16-bit 44.1 Hz), but
if it were some very uncommon or proprietary format, you could easily
find that popular audio players can't deal with it easily.

If these came from a special machine used to record court hearings,
they might create files at very low bit rates and maybe compressed,
since they only need to preserve speech, not full-fidelity sound, and
they need to pack a lot of time into a small a file as possible. The
format might be peculiar to that recording system.