Hello everyone. Help pse. Using Windows 10 with Audacity 2.4.2. I am very new to Audacity. Three weeks into it and learning fast. I am having extreme difficulty in opening any saved audio files, except for those in the ‘Recent file’ list of which there are 10 at any one time. As soon as another file is added to the top of the ‘recent files’ list, the bottom one drops off and ‘opening’ has to be from the saved list in a separate drive specifically set up to
store my saved audio file collection. I have tried saving as WAV files, and also to MP3, but have always followed the prompt to ‘save project’ when asked. The .aup and -data files are always listed together, but I just cannot open anything to do further editing, except for MP3 files, which a separate ‘app’ will open and play the audio but will not allow me to get into the individual file to edit. What am I doing wrong please? Am I saving incorrectly? All I want to do open any of the saved files to work on, and apart from the ‘recent files’ list cannot get into any of them. All the saved files are listed with their -data attachment, so I can see that they are saved in some form or another, but I get an error message every time I try to open any file saying the file cannot be found. Sorry if this is the most basic of questions but as said, I’m desperate to sort this one out. Thanks for any advice. RB.
What am I doing wrong please? Am I saving incorrectly?
I’m not sure… Are you moving files around?
You can “save” an [u]Audacity Project[/u] which is a folder and many-many small files.
Or you can “export” as a regular audio file such as WAV or MP3.*
Because a project is multiple files with a particular file structure they are more “fragile” than regular audio files and sometimes they get fouled-up if they are moved-around and/or shared.
You should always be able to open a WAV or MP3. (Except there are some corrupt or invalid MP3s “floating around” out there.).
I always recommending making a WAV file whether you make a project or not. Personally, I’m usually doing “simple edits” on one file at a time so I rarely make a project.
*MP3 is lossy compression so if you want MP3 you should export to MP3 ONCE as the last step. Don’t keep re-opening and re-editing MP3s.
Ok Doug. Thank you. With the next attempt, I’ll just try ‘Save project’ and see what happens. Am I to assume then that I shouldn’t specifically instruct the project to be saved as a WAV file? R
Am I to assume then that I shouldn’t specifically instruct the project to be saved as a WAV file?
No… In Audacity, Save and Export are different. Export as a WAV file. You might not need a project at all…
File → Export → Export as WAV. That’s fairly foolproof because it’s a single-simple WAV file.
Or in some cases (like if you already have an original WAV, etc.) you may want to make some small-simple edits and then export to MP3 or another format, and you’re done!
Then you can optionally save-as a project if you want (or need) an Audacity project.
those in the ‘Recent file’ list of which there are 10 at any one time.
I never use “Recent Files.” As you observe, that only holds ten entries. I always Export or Save to a specific place such as my desktop, a folder on my desktop, or possibly Music, or Documents. Any place I can easily find later to manage and organize.
Audacity Projects are always super high quality with no effort on your part, but as DVDDoug above, they can be brittle. You must keep similarly-named AUP files and _DATA folders together in the same location or folder.
Never change names outside of Audacity.
Use ISO dates. Today is 2020-08-04. No slash marks.
It can be handy to stop Windows from hiding filename extensions. The default Windows may have MyMusic.mp3, MyMusic.wav, and MyMusic.ac3, but it will look to you like MyMusic, MyMusic, and MyMusic. This hiding thing can be handy as long as you’re not trying to do production.
Koz