Problem using cut

I’m running Audacity 2.0.4-alpha-Jan 24 2013 On Ubuntu 12.10

From my daughters account Audacity doesn’t cut correctly. When I try and trim a small piece from the beginning of a recording it does the cut, but it also puts about 5 1/2 seconds of silence after the cut point (losing audio I want to keep).

When I do the same thing on the same file from my account it works correctly.

I compared the .audacity-data/audacity.cfg files between our acounts and all settings are the same except for directory names.

This is driving me crazy - I have no idea what’s wrong.

Does one of you have “Snap-To” selected in the lower part of the work window?

Koz

I suspect that the problem is that the Audacity temporary folder is not writeable from your daughters account.
Go to “Edit > Preferences > Directories”
If there is an option to “use RAM”, that should not be selected.
Check the location of the “Temporary Files Directory”. If that folder is not writeable from your daughters account you will need to either, change the folder permissions so that it is writeable, or change the location used by Audacity for temporary files to a location that is writeable from her account.

Thanks for the suggestions, but those things look correct.

Snap-To is not selected in either account.

The temp directory is writable from my daughter’s account.

Is this problem repeatable? If so, could you give steps so that I can reproduce the problem.

Is the length of audio removed (silenced audio + the audio that you are deleting) 262144 samples?

The problem happens every time when logged into her account, it never happens when logged into mine. I don’t know that you would be able to reproduce it.

All I’m doining it trying to cut a few seconds off the beginning of a recording. Just select with the mouse and cut.

I don’t know how to determine the number of samples.

Try this (logged in with your daughter’s account):

1. Open Audacity
2. “File menu > Save As” and save the project anywhere convenient within her home folder.
3. Record something.
4. Try editing it.

Do you still get the problem?

That helped.

When I saved a copy of the project I was then able to correctly edit the copy.

It looks like a permission problem in the original project data. I thought I had set the permissions properly, but I guess I didn’t get every file.

Thanks for your help.

To change the permissions / ownership of a project, you need to recursively change all the files and folders in the _data folder, as well as the .aup file. From the command line chmod -R and chown -R are your friends, I’m not sure about GUI tools.

As you found out, Audacity does not currently handle very well the case where writing to a project file structure fails.