Error - Audacity can't read a file from E

[anazimova]

I know other people have also had this issue. I edit podcasts and save them to an external hard drive bc my computer doesn’t have enough storage to hold more than one big podcast file at a time (and sometimes not even that). Usually as long as I save and close my file every 10 minutes or so, Audacity has been able to work with the external hard drive (before I started saving & closing regularly, it would sometimes lose the file). But now I’ve lost a file I put hours of work into. I’ve tried the recovery tool from GitHub to no avail. Does anyone have a solution and what I can do to avoid this in the future? Pasting the error report below. Thank you!

{
“timestamp”: 1723587943,
“event_id”: “dfda8ead9e37b949aba53f194a88b814”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.6.1”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Windows”,
“version”: “10.0.22631”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “File_Error”,
“value”: “Audacity failed to read from a file in .”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false,
“data”: {
“sqlite3.rc”: “11”,
“sqlite3.context”: “SqliteSampleBlock::Load::step”
}
}
}
]
}
}
LATER

{
“timestamp”: 1723655013,
“event_id”: “b7b2570cb5b1a6458e9e52f8495c96cc”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.6.1”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Windows”,
“version”: “10.0.22631”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “File_Error”,
“value”: “Audacity failed to read from a file in .”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false,
“data”: {
“sqlite3.rc”: “11”,
“sqlite3.context”: “SqliteSampleBlock::Load::step”
}
}
}
]
}
}

[DVDdoug]

If you copy the file to your local-internal drive it MIGHT work.

You can store WAV or FLAC files “anywhere” but AUP3 files are a database format that won’t work on FAT32 drives. And you may have trouble with network or cloud storage.

The AUP3 files are also a little more “fragile” than regular audio files. It’s always a good idea to keep WAV or FLAC backups. And of course, whatever other backups you need/want, depending on how important your files are.

You can also temporarily store AUP3 files anywhere but when they are open and “active” in Audacity they should be on a local drive.

System requirements

Audacity is tested on Windows 10 & Windows 11, and may also work on Windows 8.1, 7 and Vista. Both 64-bit and 32-bit versions are available. Audacity has no specific CPU or GPU requirements and should be able to run on any notebook or PC that can run aforementioned operating systems.

Note: Audacity requires fast, uninterrupted access to a hard drive or SSD to operate. Network storage, consumer-grade external hard drives or USB thumbdrives may be unreliable.

[anazimova]

Thank you, I’ll try that!

[kozikowski]

@anazimova

my computer doesn’t have enough storage to hold more than one big podcast file at a time (and sometimes not even that).

Yes, certainly move stuff around when Audacity is off…but. When you do an edit in Audacity, a clean version of the show—the whole show without the edit—is saved for UNDO. As far as I know, you can’t stop it. So if your podcast if chock full of edits and corrections, your computer has to deal with many copies of the show.

I’m seeing two and three hour long productions now and it’s making me crazy because I don’t have that much time, or Starbucks, to enjoy them.

See recent version of the WVFRM Podcast 1:34:32

Someone will correct me, but one of the ideas with the new audio.com Audacity Project Storage Process was supposed to help with this? That is the one and as far as I know only external drive that’s acceptable.

Koz

[kozikowski]

I know podcasts that use chapters. They all ran into the same problem.

Koz