After upgrading Audacity to v2.0.3 on our school computers I have found that users are unable to save new Audacity project files. This seems to be because the folder structure within the _data directory in the save location is not being created.
Example error from an Audacity log file is as follows…
12:55:04: Error: Failed to copy the file ‘C:UsersxxxxxAppDataLocalTempaudacity_tempproject10596e00d00e000006b.au’ to ‘\xxxxxstorexxxxxxxxxxDocumentsPodcastVOICE002_datae00d00e000006b.au’ (error 3: the system cannot find the path specified.)#
In this example the directories e00d00 are not created within the VOICE002_data directory (which does get created automatically) in the target save location and so the project fails to save.
However if I manually create the e00d00 directories the project saves successfully.
I think there’s a chance there are bugs, evidenced both by “unable to save project” and “unable to save “autosave” file” (Audacity’s temporary project file from which it recovers unsaved data).
Can the user export a WAV to that DocumentsPodcast folder while project saving still fails?
When you manually create the e00d00 directories, are you doing that from the user’s restricted account or from your admin account?
Before you found the problem, were you watching the directories you are saving to in Explorer or some command-line tool?
There isn’t any real answer to this at the moment, the problem being that the bug is not reproducible. You’ve identified a workaround of creating folders manually, and another workaround can be to reboot the computer.