Audacity 3.4.1 on Windows causes filenames to be corrupted when a colon is used in the filename.
A common scenario is to add date and time to the filename, such as: “recording 2023-11-13 09:35.flac”. That causes the file to be saved as “35.flac”. That can cause people to lose their work by overwriting a different file they created.
“Save as” dialogs in Audacity use Windows file picker, so they all throw “invalid filename” error, but Export Audio dialog doesn’t do that.
Use 24 hour time.
Upper Case, Lower Case, Numbers, Underscore, and Dash are the only safe characters in filenames. Anything else may cause confusion or file damage. I don’t use spaces, either.
Or worse, the damage may not be obvious until the client gets the work.
Recording_2023-11-23_0935.flac
Koz
That’s not my point at all. Any user can use “:” in filenames and destroy their existing work, or lose the track of the new file at best. Are we going to lecture them about how to write proper filenames after the fact?
Thanks for the report, we’ve logged it here:
No filename character validation when exporting a file · Issue #5612 · audacity/audacity · GitHub
Well we do warn in the manual - but Audacity is supposed to be straightforward to use, so a lot of folk don’t need to read the manual.
Peter
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