Every time I try to close a file I get a warning popup “Save project before closing?”
This may not be a problem if I’m only closing one file, but when I have many files to close it’s a real pain. I went to Prefrences>Warnings and unticked “Saving projects,” but I continue to get the warning.
I am on Windows 7 64-bit using Audacity 2.3.2
Do you have the files open in one instance of Audacity? Then you could just [X] close the track.
If you have that many Audacity programs running, then I think yes, that’s correct. I think having that many programs running can be dangerous. Someone will correct me.
Koz
There is a magic condition where Audacity will not do that, past actually saving a Project. If you open a file just to look at it and then immediately close Audacity, it won’t warn you, but I swear I’ve had that condition warn me as well.
Koz
It’s only possible to have one “instance” (one “program”) of Audacity running at a time.
One instance of Audacity can have multiple “projects” open (though I would not generally recommend doing so).
Yes. That’s a deliberate design decision. Once a project is closed, and changes in that project are gone and lost forever. In most cases there is zero chance of recovering the project once it has been closed without saving. Given the finality of the situation, the developers judgement is that the small inconvenience of having to click one button to confirm that you don’t want to save, is a small price compared to the cost of users losing their work from accidentally closing a project without saving.
Why have many projects open at the same time? There are very few reasons why it can be advantageous to have more than one project open at a time, and even less cases where you must have more than one project open at a time. Why not just work on one project at a time?
Imagine a situation where you were working on a couple of projects at the same time, and there was (hypothetically) an option to turn off the warning. Imagine too that you have spent several hours working on the projects. You save or export one of the projects, and now you have finished with that project, so you decide to close that project, but you accidentally “Exit” Audacity rather than “Close”. Audacity then does what you told it to do and exits. All of your hours of work on the other “not saved” project is immediately and permanently lost and gone forever.
On the other hand, as Audacity is now, if you accidentally clicked “Exit” (in the above scenario), then you get two chances to cancel before hours of your work is wiped out. MUCH safer.
If you have a bunch of extra tracks, each in their own file, you can open one up and then import them in to create one, big project.
File → Import → Audio
Thanks to all for the input.
Still have this problem
My case is that listening to raw wave file is much more accurate (and pleasing using my vacuum tube system). I do not touch the wave file and just quit. Hence the system should sort of know nothing has been changed other than the files being played. Still using the latest version the warning even if click to empty still warn you. Not sure why. All systems have a way to know if the files have not been changed, it can quit. Not every file you have touched you have to close it first before you can quit Word, MacOS, … whatever.
And if the user is what you worried, one can at least in the session start to warn users have set this option. But sure the key one knows nothing change and warning is …
Sigh.
Dennis
When you import an audio file into Audacity, it creates an new “AUP3” project file. When you close Audacity, if the project has not been saved, Audacity asks if you want to save it or discard it.
Many people, like me, use Audacity just to view sound waveforms, not to create a full editing project. On my PC, Audacity is the default program for .wav files. I create hundreds of .wav files during the day using external software, and I open them in Audacity only to view the waveforms and listen, not to create a full editing project. And hundreds of times, when I close the window, I’m interrupted by that annoying prompt to save. Save something I didn’t edit. Save something that wasn’t changed. This prompt wastes my time and makes me think bad things about the developers.
I understand that Audacity creates a new project when opening a .wav file. But it should have at least a minimum level of intelligence to know that this was just a temporary project, that the person didn’t change anything and only opened the file to view the waveforms and listen.
The developers should take into account this vast use case and the annoyance and time loss that this message causes for people. And not give an excuse like “we decided it should be this way” and stay closed-minded to other use cases.
If you don’t want to change the software’s default behavior out of fear that others might lose their projects, at least provide a configurable option for the thousands of people who don’t use Audacity for projects, but only as a waveform viewer and player.
When Audacity opens from a file that’s not a project, and the software creates a new project, it should set a variable “AutoCreatedProject=True”. Additionally, it could create a string with the hash of all the audio tracks. On exit, if the hash is the same and the AutoCreatedProject variable is True, it doesn’t show the save message. That way, you’ll serve a lot of people who don’t use Audacity the way you expect them to.
This post has been viewed by almost 2,000 people. They represent a small proportion of the many who felt so annoyed that they went to the preferences to look for the option to turn off the message but didn’t find it, searched the internet for how to disable it, and managed to reach this post. If we estimate that 50% of those who searched didn’t reach the post, that’s 4,000 people. If we estimate that 90% didn’t search the internet at all and only checked the preferences, that’s 36,000. If we estimate that 90% are annoyed but use the software anyway, that’s 324,000 annoyed people. There aren’t just a few users who hate this message.
Sorry, but this does not say much. I usually look at all new posts as long as the title lets me assume that I either learn something new, or I think I can solve a problem of another user. I am usually not doing a search like you do. And the thread was opened in July 2019 - more than 6 years ago. And your “324’000 annoyed people” - well, I could top this with other wild calculations if you want.
As far as I know, Audacity is not the best choice for just for playing a sound file, there are other programs which can do this without trying to save something after every use. Audacity is a program for recording and editing sound.
And no, I am not involved in the development of Audacity, I am just a mostly satisfied user and try to help others here.