I bought a brand new Mac and Seagate external hard drive about 6 months ago. I will sometimes edit my recordings on my windows laptop and just plug my seagate into my laptop. Haven’t had any issues until now. It seems that some of my files will open and some will not and I get the error message…that Audacity failed to read file…or cannot read file… This is on both the MAC and the windows laptop. I have so little on the external drive, like hardly anything and it’s 1TB. I don’t see how on earth anything could be corrupt. I’ve been working on finishing up a book and am editing the last chapter. I have ten minutes of the chapter left to edit and I’ve been doing exactly the same thing as I have been doing for months, nothing different. What would have changed ? Does anyone have any idea what is wrong or how I can fix this? I have searched everywhere for a fix but I can’t find anything that seems to directly relate to my issue. I’m totally clueless. Also, everything is up to date and I’m running the most current version of audacity.
Thank you!
Although you wrote a lot of text - we should know a little bit more.
- What operating systems for Windows and for Mac… Not “latest”, but the version number.
- What version of Audacity (version number)
- How is the external drive formatted - HFS+, APFS, NTFS, FAT32, …?
- …
- The exact error message
sorry I did not mean to hit solved!
Thanks for responding.
- macOS Sonoma 14.5, Windows 11 Home 23H2
- Audacity - 3.6.1
- ExFAT
- on MAC the exact error message is "Audacity failed to read from a file in /Volumes/Backup Plus/(the folder name). On Windows it’s "Audacity failed to read a file from D:
on MAC the exact error message is "Audacity failed to read from a file in /Volumes/Backup Plus/(the folder name). On Windows it’s "Audacity failed to read a file from D:
on the hard drive, I store my projects under their own folder. If I have chapters, I store them in their own chapter folder under the project folder. I opened a bunch of them and it seems to be the last two chapter folders (3 and 4) I’ve worked on in my last project. For Chapter 3, I have it exported as a wav and mp3 so that is no problem for me to access at least but for Chapter 4, I didn’t have it exported yet.
Try copying the file to your regular internal hard drive. If it’s not corrupt t should open from there.
Audacity doesn’t “like” working directly with external drives, network drives, or “the cloud”.
It’s OK to temporarily store AUP3 files anywhere, but you should be actively working from an internal drive.
A “failed to read from file” error often means a corrupted AUP3 file.
There is a file recovery program what works on Windows. I don’t know where it is, but one of the other forum elves may be able to point you to it.
oh man…ok. I did try that already and it wouldn’t open. I wonder what makes it corrupt when I didn’t change anything ? ugh. guess that’s technology. Thank you for your help.
Anyone know where I can find instructions on how to recover a corrupted AUP3 file on windows?
I found the instructions. I will give it a go
There’s another level of this, too. Audacity has been getting more picky about directly using external drives. All production and file manipulation should be on the Internal, System, or C:\ drive, depending on your machine.
So leave Audacity closed and move the files to your internal drive and then open up Audacity for production. Save thing in reverse. Close Audacity and then shuffle files around.
The only exception is the new ability to save Projects (only) to audio.com cloud service directly from Audacity. I wouldn’t get to fuzzy-warm about that yet because there have been people unable to retrieve their Projects from audio.com (the only copy of the valuable show, of course).
I know you’re saying to yourself this is silly. “I’ve been using external drives for Leventy-Five years with no bad effects.”
Yes, but. We run into Everybody Knows.
Everybody knows not to try and set up a critical music overdubbing edit session with a Cloud Drive on the other side of the country. Similarly, you can use a convenient USB or Thunderbolt office drive all day long.
Where’s the cutoff? How about a nice home network drive in the garage? Two Thunderbolt drives in an office hub? You see the problem? I can see why they insist on doing everything on the internal drive. Full Stop.
Koz
yes it makes sense…I"ll be working in the internal drive when using audacity from now on.
Recovered! The “fix” from @jademan worked. will NOTTTTTT be working on ANY files on my external hard drive anymore. Thank you!
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