Hey all,
I am in the process of recording a song with multiple instrument and vocal tracks. I’ve been working at it for about 2 weeks and today I went to open up the file, only to see this message: Error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 1340. It’s frustrating because I don’t know what is wrong and I don’t know what happened to make it this way.
Please help me out, this is a very important recording to me and I’m stuck!
Also, here is some tech info for what I am running:
• Audacity 2.0.6 (recording software)
• TASCAM US-1641 (recording interface)
• Windows 8.0 operating system
This is going to sound like a dumb question, but how did I make a copy of the file and get it into Notepad? I’ve tried to right click on the AUP file and “copy”, then “paste” into Notepad, but paste does not even come up as an option when I get to the Notepad… like nothing registered as copying.
Even with Word Wrap off, it seems Notepad (at least on Windows 7) doesn’t format AUP (or AUTOSAVE) files properly because it does not understand LF line endings.
It would be easier to view in Wordpad. Default Save in Wordpad is OK as long as there are not Unicode characters in the file.
NotePad++ is fine. You should use that anyway if you have Unicode characters in the file.
I suppose you could argue that AUP and AUTOSAVE should be written with Windows CR-LF line endings given that is our majority platform and given Mac and Linux can handle that. I will duck behind the parapet now.
Windows can “handle” LF, (some Windows applications do) but Microsoft’s inchoate NotePad doesn’t.
CR-LF is two bytes, two commands:
= Carriage Return,
= Line Feed; essentially double spacing, though Microsoft choose to interpret it as single spacing, thus adding unnecessary bloat to all text files. “Unnecessary bloat” is nothing new to Microsoft, but I see no reason that we should follow that practice.
I never was quite sure what “overkill” meant for an editor, especially when it comes to opening “.aup” files.
If I open an “.aup” file in Notepad++, the first few lines read like this:
Obviously, this is not for the faint-hearted! This is XML programming language!
This said, XPad text editor is a much simpler free standalone text editor than Notepad++. It is a cross-platform text editor with full Unicode support. It can open and save “.aup” files correctly.
Not quite. It is a Windows application, but supports text files from Windows, Mac and Linux. It is not designed to “run” on Mac or Linux, only Windows.
WordPad can read and write any Unicode characters inside the app itself, but if you save an AUP file containing Unicode characters in WordPad (even as “Unicode Text (.txt)”) it is either DOS/ANSI or UCS-2 Little Endian according to what the characters are.
Audacity won’t be able to open that Wordpad-saved AUP, so you will have to open the AUP in Notepad++ and either remove the Unicode characters if the file is ANSI, or convert the file to UTF-8 without BOM if the file is UCS-2 Little Endian.
NotePad++ is also potentially confusing with its complex menus and options unless the user is told exactly how to use it.
Hey guys,
So I really appreciate all the responses, but I keep disappointing. I’ve tried opening my file in Notepad & Wordpad, but absolutely nothing pulls up. It must be undetectable to those programs from what I can tell.
Gale, I will attach the file and if you can do anything to make it work again I would be beyond grateful!!!
I’ve attached the .AUP file below. Please let me know if this will not work for diagnosing the problem. I tried to convert the file to a WAV file, but I could not export the project’s audio, because the Error won’t let me access any of my audio tracks
This seems one of those cases where the AUP file did not complete saving, so is truncated. Did Audacity or this project seem to close normally when you last closed it? Did you power off the instant you saved the project?
The only way I think we’ll open the project is to remove from the AUP file the incomplete “Drum 2” track (only some of its left channel is written to the AUP). So I did that in the AUP file attached. The file should open with a warning about “orphan block files”. Choose the option in the warning to “Continue without deleting”. Don’t change anything in the project, just play it to see what’s missing, open Help > Show Log… and save the log file, then close the project.
The complete data for the “Drum 2” track will be in the “Hillbilly Circus_data” folder - the AU files for “Drum 2” (and the AU files for any other tracks that were not written to the AUP) will be the “orphan” files mentioned in the warning. The Log will show you which files are the orphans that are not in the fixed project, but there is no way to piece the files together short of dragging them into Audacity and and rearranging them into a new track or tracks.
