For users of Windows Movie Maker

[ubizmo]

Those of you who use Windows Movie Maker to create videos, as I do, may discover the following quirk: When you import audio into WMM to use as a track, you may find that you get terrible distortion when you put it on the timeline.  This is very puzzling because WMM lets you play it as its sitting in the "Collections" pane, and it sounds fine.  But as soon as you actually put it down in the timeline, when you play the video, the audio sounds terrible.  Or it might.  If it does, you'll hear awful high-frequency screeching and crackling sounds.

I've had this happen often, when using Audacity and then importing the files into WMM.  I never knew what to do about it, until today.  In fact, I just about gave up trying to import audio into WMM.  I searched through the WMM help forums and couldn't find anything (doesn't mean the answer's not there), but I finally found the solution on Youtube.  Here it is: The audio file that you import into WMM has to be sampled at 44.1 kHz, and it has to be stereo.  If it's 48 kHz or mono, WMM can't cope.  I experimented a bit and, sure enough, this works.  People have posted other workarounds, involving converting audio from one format to another and back using different software, but apparently the reason why these workarounds work is that one of the conversions changes the sampling rate to 44.1 kHz.  In any event, it's not caused by Audacity.

ubizmo

[jiminos]

that is EXCELLENT, Ubi! thanks. i use WMM and have experienced that particular challenge. Thank you very much for finding the fix.

be well,

jim

[Psoewish]

Thanks for the info, I'll keep that in mind when I want to make more "advanced" videos with actual editing someday

[ForestsRequiem]

Thank you very much Ubizmo! I prefer WMM over my other video editor, but the audio quality, discouraged me! I'll try using WMM for my next video!