My Mac keeps getting hung up on sound files

[Barry Garsson]

I have a digital sound recorder that is supposed to transfer its files to a computer - I was trying to simply copy the files over to a new folder in my Mac but the copy and paste function keeps getting hung up and freezes (ghosts of Windows!), something I am not used to in my new Mac (I'm a relatively new user).

Several times I had to reboot the Mac with the power button to clear it. The digital files are apparently rather large, but the Mac handles the capture of video tapes quite well, and allows me to back those very large files up to an external drive, so I don't understand why these sound files are causing such a hang-up.

The digital recorder records the sound as WMA files which my Mac won't read, but a free downloaded converter converts them to WAV files and then they work. is it the WMA structure that is causing the problem?

Right now I am getting ready to abort a conversion for what appears to be a large WMA file (211 mg) since I see only the little colored pinwheel spinning and I am again going to have to power down and power back up (I hate having to do that). Am I low on memory (have 1.5 gig RAM)?

Anybody?

Thanks in advance.

Barry

[Barry Garsson]

Need to add a note to this. I am attempting to copy some files from the digital recorder (WMA files) to my hard drive. The smallest of the three is 2.14 megabytes, certainly nothing so extraordinary that it's unusual, but my Mac is behaving as if it were a terrabyte size file:

For the past 20 minutes it's been "preparing to copy...." and I suspect if I leave it all night it will not have accomplished anything by morning. This is very strange.

Is it possible that the USB connected recorder is causing the Mac to hang up? Or is it the nature of WMA files? Has anybody else had this problem?

Barry

[Barry Garsson]

I am still playing with this problem. For what it's worth:

1) if I use the Switch program to convert the WMA file in two stages, it works very well: step one is to convert the file from WMA to MP3 - that actually takes only seconds. Then convert the MP3 (which is now on the hard drive) file to an AIFF or WAV that also takes only seconds. I left the one step conversion (WMA directly to AIFF) run overnight and had to reboot the Mac in the morning. And...

2) I used my backup software (Chronosynch) to try to copy the WMA file from the digital sound recorder directly to the Mac drive (instead of copy and paste) - there I notice that Chronosynch will not "recognize" the WMA files in the recorder (only the parent folder there) - the files remain grayed out.

I still do not understand what happened and why it didn't work, and why it did.

Barry