Can't open AUP file

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

I have an Audacity Project (AUP file & _data directory) which I’ve been happily using for some time. Here are the names:

“whitenoise 5+ halfspeed.aup”
“whitenoise 5+ halfspped_data/”

Notice that the names don’t agree completely because I misspelled the project name when I first created it, then changed the name of the AUP file. I did that long ago and the project continued to work properly. Today, I needed to share the Project with someone else, so to avoid confusion I changed the name of the “whitenoise 5+ halfspped_data” directory to match the name of the AUP file, so the new name is “whitenoise 5+ halfspeed_data”. Next I used a text editor to change the 3rd line of the AUP so that ‘projname’ referred to the modified directory name.

Next I double-clicked the AUP file but found that Audacity wouldn’t load it, instead I would get this error:

Error Importing:
“D:\whitenoise\whitenoise 5+ halfspeed.sup” is an audacity project file. Use the “File>Open” command to open Audacity projects.

If I followed the Error pop-up instructions, I would get exactly the same error.

I poked around your wiki and this forum and saw the recommendation to install version 3 (I was running 2.4 I think), so I did that. But the new version gives me this error:

Error Importing:
Audacity did not recognize the type of file ‘D:\whitenoise\whitenoise 5+halfspeed.aup’.
Try installing FFmpeg.
For uncompressed files, try File>Import>Raw Data

I re-installed FFmpeg, then tried again and got this message:

Error Importing:
Audacity did not recognize the type of file ‘D:\whitenoise\whitenoise 5+halfspeed.aup’.
For uncompressed files, try File>Import>Raw Data

I tried importing as Raw Data and get a 1/2 second waveform that sounds like a mosquito buzzing in your ear (the original project is around 5 minutes of audio).

I’m attaching my AUP file. (The audio file directory is 227 MBytes so I’m not trying to attach that.)

Please help!
whitenoise 5+ halfspeed.aup (35.7 KB)

2

You don’t need all that. You can’t change the names of either the AUP file or the _DATA folders outside of Audacity. You should reverse the last change.

changed the name of the AUP file. I did that long ago and the project continued to work properly.

That was not supposed to work. That should have failed. The official name of the show is burned into the AUP file.




Next I used a text editor to change the 3rd line of the AUP so that ‘projname’ referred to the modified directory name.

Did you change both? If it’s a stereo show, that entry may appear twice.

Messing with the Project names like that is insanely dangerous and is one of the reasons for the Project format change in Audacity 3.0.0.

Koz

3

Thank you. I did try reverting my changes but I still got the same errors, so I think I unreverted. I’ll try again. Maybe the new release will treat the reversion differently.

Addendum: Everything is back as it was originally – only 2 changes, the file name and line 3 of the AUP fie – but Audicity still chokes on it.

4

For the benefit of any other users reading this topic, the safe way to change the name of an Audacity 2.x project is:

  1. Open the project in Audacity
  2. “File menu > Save Project > Save Project As…” and give it a new name.

This issue becomes moot with Audacity 3.0.0 as projects are now saved as a single, self contained “.aup3” file.


@ thosrecht
I don’t suppose you still have a backup copy of the original “whitenoise 5+ halfspped” project do you?

5

Thanks Steve. I didn’t think I had a backup but, now that you mention it, I’ll look a little harder.