EggXpert

Four or five weeks ago I bought my very first iPod and then today I took it right back to the store to get my money back. The problem: the last couple of years I recorded a lot of conversational/dialogue oriented content with a really neat and very reliable Olympus digital voice recorder. So...I have a ton of WAVE files saved on my Dell desktop. I then went out and bought a 5th generation iPod Nano. I need to be able to listen to some of those WAVE files when I walk around town, so in order to accomplish that I did what the techs at Apple told me to do, I loaded them/transferred them over to iTunes. All of them went straight into iTunes and were switched over from a WAVE exe to an iTune exe. And the iPod would not play them! (Though it would play a song downloaded from iTunes.)

Furthermore, the techs at Apple were stumped. None of them, not even their supervisors, had a ready instant fix for this issue. They all dealt me the GEE WE DON'T KNOW HOW TO GET A WAVE FILE TO PLAY ON THE IPOD NANO SINCE WE'VE NEVER HEARD OF THIS PROBLEM BEFORE card. They all acted like they were brainless. Seems to me a problem of this sort is one they see many times a week (people just like me who bought their first iPod who now want to be able to listen to WAVE files - WAVE files that contain important conversations or important dialogue). Anyone have a fix for this? I can always go out and buy another iPod. Is there something at download.com that would make a WAVE file playable on an iPod???

http://download.cnet.com/windows/itunes-and-i

Wow...

All you had to do was just convert them from wav to mp3. This is easily done right in itunes.

Such a simple problem and solution it's too bad you had to go through so much trouble.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1550

yep like iron man said it pretty simple to conver them using any of 100 free softwares on the net. Good thing Mac has all those mac geniuss

IronMan77:

Wow...

All you had to do was just convert them from wav to mp3. This is easily done right in itunes. Such a simple problem and solution it's too bad you had to go through so much trouble.

Never owned an MP3 player before - never owned an Apple product before - so this is all new to me.

And it was a heck of a lot of trouble thanks to the witless Apple tech support crew who robbed me of a lot of time in trying to get the Nano to play an Olympus WAVE file. If it's 'easily done' as you say, one has to wonder why the 4 or 5 American iPod techs I talked to couldn't fix it. They were CLUELESS. If it's as easy as you say then the first Apple tech I talked to shoulda been able to fix it right there on the spot on the first call I made to them. I spent A LOT of time on the phone with them and that would include troubleshooting the Nano with 2 Apple supervisors. Apple's ridiculous. Ridiculous in more ways than one. Ridiculous in that they don't provide their techs with remote access. RA is a fantastic tool that'll cut a 40 minute troubleshooting session in half, down to like 20 minutes. The boss at the top of Apples tech department knows all about RA. That person for whatever reason decided not to provide their techs and customers with remote access. NOT providing their Mac computer techs and their iPod techs with remote access is like a heart surgeon trying to diagnose a patients heart problem w/o a stethescope. Stupid. Dell has RA. HP has RA. Seagate has RA. Hell, even Costco's tech department has RA. And I tend to think the tech department at Sam's Club will someday have it but at this point that's pure speculation. There's NO EXCUSE for Apple not to equip their techs with remote access NONE. Christ if Apple is gonna shell out cash to Bono to plug their iPod then they can afford to arm their techs with remote access.

This new to MP3 n00b had no idea that you first had to convert a WAVE file to an MP3 file AND THEN import the newly created mp3's into iTunes. And neither did any of the 4 or 5 Apple techs and the 2 Apple supervisors I talked to. What one Apple tech did 'help me' do was to transfer all the WAVE files from my desktop over into iTunes. We did not change them into an MP3 file as IronMan77 reccomended we do. So that's the key to getting the Nano to fly in harmony with a WAVE file???? We (I, the Apple techs and their two supervisors) skipped that procedure altogether. I just might go back to the store to get another iPod and see if I can get it to play with an Olympus WAVE file. If the Zune came with a video camera like the Nano does I'd forget about the friggin' iPod and just buy a Zune, but it doesn't so what are you gonna do. Thanks for sharing, IronMan77 :)

No problem

There had to be some kind of miscommunication because it's hard to believe that even the mac people couldn't recommend converting the wav files to mp3's and then importing them into itunes... they are dumb but may be reaching new all time lows, lol.

Well no matter what mp3 player you go with just be sure to first convert your WAV's into MP3's first and you should be good to go. 

 

IronMan77:

There had to be some kind of miscommunication because it's hard to believe that even the mac people couldn't recommend converting the wav files to mp3's and then importing them into itunes...

 There was no miscommunication. The problem was super simple in nature, not complex. I told them I had just purchased my first MP3 player, the 5th generation Nano. I told them my goal was this: I have WAV files on my PC that I want to listen to on the Nano. WAV files created using an Olympus digital voice recorder. "I'm new to MP3 players. And I just bought my first Apple product. Is it possible to listen to WAV files on the Nano?" I asked them. "I need to know how to do that" I told them. Pretty cut and dry. Not the least bit complex. Shoulda been childs play. Shoulda been a quick fix. Four or five of their techs were stumped as were two of their supervisors (all American techs BTW). And when I asked two different Apple techs if the Nano comes with AM functionality, they didn't know the answer to that question! They had to put me on hold and 'research it'. Clearly Apple releases incompetent techs onto their front line, techs who do not know their product inside and out as they should. What's goin' on there??? All they have to do is order their techs to 'immerse themselves' in said device and the devices manual - give them ample time and a fair amount of time to do that - and then give each tech a quiz test when the immersion process is complete. A quiz test, just like in grade school. Nothing hard about that. And then there was the one iPod tech in Minnesota who told me he was 100% certain that Apples computer tech department has remote access. He was a nice tech who had a strange opinion about Apples involvement with remote access. He didn't know what he was talking about because Apple does not have remote access period.

 The WAV to MP3 programs that you mentioned earlier...are they programmed to do nothing more than rename the filenames extension? The way a person could do it manually? Manually as in:

>you'd put your cursor on the file and right click on it
>a drop down menu appears and you select 'Rename File'
>you then manually rename the file '.mp3'

That's it? Is that all you'd need to do to make the iPod compatible with a WAV file or do these programs do something more complex, something more than meets the eye?

http://www.google.com/search?q=wav+to+mp3+converter

 

 

You say the problem was super simple, but in reality it may not be. Just because you have some .wav files does not mean that they're in the standard "PCM" format.. You said that they were "Olympus" wave files, I wouldn't put it past Olympus to have their own proprietary file format for these files..

As long as you have the proper codecs in place, iTunes will be able to play and encode these files...

The nano does play standard PCM .wav files..  The problem likely is that your wav files aren't real standardized wav files, they're Olympus wav files in Olympus's proprietary file format..   Olympus has been known to pull stunts like that where instead of using an industry standard, they create their own way of doing things that break compatibility..  They do it with their proprietary memory cards so they can make royalties on every memory chip sold and I wouldn't be surprised if they did it on file formats as well..

I can't imagine any reason why anybody would even have .wav files on their PC as the ideal format to preserve quality and maintain a sane amount of hard drive space would be some lossless codec like FLAK or loseless AAC..   As long as you encode to lossless AAC. You will see a huge reduction in file size and no reduction in quality, and it will be playable on an iPod nano.. 

 Your problem likely is that, what you think are .wav files aren't really PCM standard .wav files..  But as long as you have some olympus software / codecs installed, they should be playable and encodeable to other formats..

So just convert to Apple Lossless and you'll be fine.. Unless of course for some reason that you can't play/encode these files on your PC and then you might be SOL..

P.S. You can't expect Apple to know all about how some proprietary Olympus file format that Olympus conveniently named ".wav" may not really follow the standardized ".wav" PCM file format..

P.P.S. Import the files into itunes, go into your preferences, make sure that your conversion / encoding settings are set to apple lossless.. Then select the files in itunes, right click and convert /encode them..  

P.P.P.S.  And no, renaming the files does nothing..  The files will still be in the same format that they were before, except now they'll be incorrectly named.  You should encode / transcode them to a lossless codec to preserve 100% quality (not MP3 since that is a lossy codec that removes things on the cusp of being audible in order to shrink file size as much as possible.).

Wow, sucks you had so much trouble.

i was having the same problem with my 5.5 gen 60gb video. I wanted to play my .flac beatles albums, and wav files i made on my own, which of course apples software wouldnt allow me. i reformatted with rockbox (check it out at rockbox.org).rockbox allows me to play everything i want, and more. its awesome, i love my ipod now. So free from apples mighty grip! what it does is allow you to put any kind of files you want on your ipod, no "syncing" required. you simply drag and drop the folders you want into your ipod folder from my computer.  anyone who says itunes is great and peachy has no clue what they are talking about, dont listen to them. pm if you want more info bro