Application database backup failed

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

I’m editing a podcast episode in Audacity on Windows. The project worked normally through about 90% of the edit, then suddenly every edit began taking anywhere from 30 seconds to over an hour. I also receive repeated “Automatic database backup failed” warnings and previously saw SQLite/database-related errors.

Things I’ve already tried:

Restarted Windows.

Saved the project under a new name.

Created a new Audacity project and copied the tracks into it (same problem).

Verified that brand-new, simple Audacity projects work normally.

Freed disk space on C drive.

The problem appears to be isolated to this episode and any rebuilt version of it. Is this a known AUP3/SQLite database issue, and is there a way to repair the project or recover it without re-editing the entire episode from scratch?

2

I can’t help/test on that platform myself and just searched for the error message. The forums find 20 results. A few more via Google.

2 thoughts: Perhaps knowing your Audacity version might help. Perhaps GitHub - audacity/audacity-project-tools · GitHub can help you.

Is sharing the project file or the XML extracted from the project via audacity-project-tools an option for you?

3

I’ve seen posts about edits taking a long time lately. I suspect it’s SQLite.

The answer I’ve seen the most often is to extract the audio to a lossless format and then open that as a new project.

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4

Thank you. See my solution in a response to another commenter.

5

Thanks for commenting. It sparked a few ideas. As it turns out I had to save every track separately as a .wav and put them into a new file and then I was able to finish everything. I’m not exactly stating every single step but that was the gist of it. It worked and it’s done!!

6

That sounds a lot like a bit overflow in a field in SQLite. The developers are not known to participate in this forum, but maybe someone might see it and it sparks something.

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