I recorded about an hour’s worth of voiceover with Audacity on a MAC in the studio I use. I edit at home on my Windows 7 PC. As I have done many times before with this project (an audiobook), I saved the day’s work to a thumb drive as an Audacity project and also saved it to the desktop in the studio.
When I tried to edit it at home, I received this message: “Audacity did not recognize the type of file.” I have transferred files with thumb drives many times before, and this has never happened. I saved the files to my desktop from the thumb drive, but I get the same error message.
The only thing I can think of is that I may have saved these files directly to the thumb drive, whereas previous files were saved to the desktop first. Would that make a difference? How can I access these files? My deadline is coming up.
Make sure you are using File > Open… to open the AUP file and not File > Import > Audio… .
If the project was open when you saved it to the thumb drive you may be storing audio data for the undo / redo mechanism for the open project. This will make the _data folder larger and will result in “orphan block file” errors when you reopen the project. However the errors are not harmful to the project.
Did you have enough space on the thumb drive given the _data folder could be larger than you thought?
Thanks. I looked further down on the thumb drive list and found another Audacity project with the same name. This does open, and it does indeed say that there are 40 orphan files. Should I continue without deleting the orphans, as Audacity is suggesting? Does that create any issues later? After editing, I will be exporting the project as a wav. file.
It’s always safest to keep the orphans. That should not create any issues, but make sure the audio of the project is correct before closing it.
It seems like you were not expecting to have an identically named project on the thumb drive, so be aware there is a small chance (for whatever reason) that the 40 orphan files could belong to some other project (if so they will be “missing” files in that other project). So make sure all other projects are correct before deleting this project.
If there is any incorrect audio in your current project then the correct AU data could be in the _data folder of the identically named project. This is not likely to happen, I’m just pointing out what to look for if there are problems.