audio file cannot be read or written

I’m using Audacity 2.2.1 on a Mac OS X Yosemite (ver 10.10.5). I was getting an error while trying to export my Audacity project to an mp3. The error message was “File Error: Audacity failed to read from file.” I tried multiple times (rebooting and quitting Audacity), and nothing worked. I was going to send the project files to a friend to try for me.

However, there was one file the routinely failed to uploaded to a cloud shared drive despite no interruption in internet connection. I had the idea of compressing the files before trying to upload to the shared drive, but I received an error message with that too. The error message is “An error occurred while compressing a file.” I tried this multiple times with the same result.

I then tried to save the project as a new project in another location. The error message I received then was “Error: Could not save project. Perhaps (file name) is not writable or the disk is full.” The file that was named was the same one that I was unable to upload when I was trying to upload all the files to the shared drive.

Then I tried saving the project files on a flash drive, thinking I could then move the files to another computer to at least compress, but that failed. The error message I received then was “The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in (file name) can’t be read or written. Error code - 36.” Again, it named the same file that was named in the other error messages.

Any ideas of how to proceed? Would I be able to delete that one file, or would that damage the entire project? Do I have to scrap the entire project?

Where is the project currently saved?

How long is the show?
How much storage do you have?
Did you put punctuation marks in the filename? Particularly if you want to share files with someone else, punctuation marks are a bad idea. Upper case, lower case, numbers, -dash- and underscore are the only unconditionally safe filename characters. No slashmarks or dots. Today is 2018-08-08 in the ISO form.

Koz

Oh, and don’t change the name of a Project outside of Audacity. The show will drop dead. Open it in Audacity and save it as a different name using the above rules.

Koz