Can not find files

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hello
I made an .aup mix at my school for the music lesson. I used 3 songs to make the mix. I saved the file as .aup and sent it to my email so I could work on it at home. I re-downloaded all of the music files that I used at the school computer and tried to open my project, I got the error which you can find as a screenshot. Could anyone tell me how I can solve this problem? You would save me a lot of time.
Thank you in advance
Audacity Error screenshot.PNG

2

An Audacity project has two main parts

  1. the .aup file which is just the “project manager” telling Audacity how to assemble the rest of the project
  2. a folder in the same location called _data

The error message in your post is because you only have the .aup and not the project folder with all the sound clips.

See: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/audacity_projects.html

WC

3

And… You may run into email file-size limits if you try to email the whole project. A thumb drive or one of the cloud file sharing services might work better.

And, I recommend you have copies of your 3 original files, and any exported audio files. Regular audio files are more “foolproof” than Audacity project files/folders.

4

Thank you DVDdoug and waxcylinder for your help. I could not fix the problem since the school computer deletes all the files when you log of from your account due to how the crappy network system works. Could you than tell me how I should save my files in the future so that this problem does not occur again?

5

Are you allowed to use thumb drives (memory sticks)?
If not, are you allowed to burn a data CD?
If not, are you allowed to use dropbox or Google Drive (or similar)?

To continue working on the project, you need to take the whole project with you, not just the AUP file. Projects are usually too big to email.

The best way to save a whole project depends on the exact version of Audacity you have. If you have a recent enough version:
“File menu > Save Project > Save Lossless Copy of Project”

This will create an AUP file and a “_data” folder.

Ideally you would:

  1. save the project to the local machine,
  2. then create a new folder on a thumb drive,
  3. then copy the AUP file and the _data folder into the new folder on the thumb drive.

Then, at home, you would:

  1. Scan the thumb drive for viruses
  2. Copy the complete folder from the thumb drive to your computer
  3. Open the copy with Audacity
  4. Save the project with a new and unique name to the local hard drive.

Note that this way, Audacity is always working with the project from the local hard drive, which is by far the safest and most reliable way for Audacity to operate. Thumb drives are convenient for temporary storage, but they are much more error prone than hard drives.

6

Thank you.