Hi. I was rushing to record something off the radio and I installed n-track that was residing on my PC. My n-track is unregistered. The recording was 2 hours long and I had to save as a packed song file. It’s large about 1GB. I find I cannot play this file with n-track. When I select it to play n-track throws up a “file save” menu. And if I click that n-track stops responding. Is it possible for an unregistered copy of n-track to play the file? Thanks.
Okay more info. When I’m in n-track, and I highlight the file, if instead of clicking on “select” (when I right click) I click on, “open”, I get the message “.sgw can’t accept this kind of file”. After I saved the file and could not open it, I downloaded what is possibly a later verion of n-track and this is what is now installed on my PC. But in any event the first installed n-track did not seem to be able to open the file.
I have no idea if a demo version can open a packed song file. I would try opening n-track first then use it’s open command - see if that works.
A packed sgw file is just a bundle of the .sng and the referenced .wav files. The .wav files are compressed into the .sgw by default. The referenced wave should still be on the machine is the .sgw isn’t opening.
When n-Tracks pops up the Save dialog it’s decompressing the .wav files and saving them to disk, along with the .sng file. n-Tracks may seem like it’s not responding because a 1 gig wave file is huge. It will take a really long time. It’s hard to tell how long it would take, but it could take hours. Even a three minute song with 8 totally uncompressed tracks takes a lot longer than you’d expect to unpack.
Select Save and go watch “Titanic” all the way through. See if it’s doing anything when the movie is done…it might still be writing to the disk. 
Pop open the directory you select to save to and see if the files in there are getting larger. If not then there could be an error or hang.
I’m pretty sure the demo will unpack an sgw, but it probably won’t save one.
Everything is okay. I did not know that saving the file was the correct ation, I thought that was a fault. Then the “save” menu went blank, which reinforced that idea as did the message “not responding” in Windows task manager. I gave it about 5 minutes and it had unpacked the file. I can now play the unpacked file. Of course, cannot save it as a WAV file. Thanks. Rich
It’s already saved as a wave if the unpacking worked. Right click on the tracks and pop open the track properties. There should be a button, or something, in there for Wave File Properties. That will have the path to the referenced file. With that you can find and grab the wavefile to do whatever you want with it. That will be the unedited, unmixed wave file.
But, yes, you are right. With the demo you will not be able to save a mixdown. Since you are working with one wave file you may be able to do all you need in a wave editor. There are some good free ones out there.
Okay, so I can save as a WAV file. That would be great. As you say, I’m not mixing down, all I recorded was a mono signal on two channels, so no sense of mixing down. Actually I recorded the last broadcast of RTE 1 on 567 Khz. (Radio Athlone as was). Rich
No. When you “Save As a Wave File” in the File Menu from a song project you will be taken to the mixdown stuff. You can’t do that from the demo without adding tones to the result.
Were did the sgw file come from? I don’t understand what you mean when you said you had to save as a packed song. The demo doesn’t prevert saving sng files.