Error Opening Project (Lock File?)

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Audacity 2.3.1
Mac OS 10.15.3

Help! I’ve lost months of podcast and guests.

I run audacity on Catalina through terminal (the workaround with external Mic issues) and normally leave everything up and running. I moved my desktop from one location to another and opened again with terminal, all worked, no issues, and files recovered.

This morning the WiFi network was having IP problems and I had to change the static IP address (as I am in a secure, in-home hotspot network), the computer unexpectedly restarted and I went to open via terminal again.

This time, when opening Audacity I was receiving messages that read "“Audacity is already running. The system has detected that another copy of Audacity is running. Running two copies of Audacity simultaneously may cause data loss or may cause your system to crash.”

This seemed to clear up when I closed all and then manually reopened from the terminal again, however --now my files won’t open (see screenshot)

At one point this morning before all, I had moved the aup files into a folder on desktop for neat and easy access as I load all podcast episodes.

I’m hopeful that it’s a simple fix and maybe it’s too far from the _data file?

Please help! Thank you so much!!

Lauren
lpmac33 screenshop.png

2

Are you trying to open the AUP files from the Open Recent menu? If you have moved the AUP files then the information stored in the recent files list will no longer point to the files.

The AUP files must be kept in the same folder as the _data folders associated with those AUP files. If you moved the AUP files and not the _data folders then you need to either move the AUP files back where they were (with their _data folders), or move the _data folders to be in the same folder as their associated AUP files.

– Bill

3

Thanks Bill, I opened a new folder and moved all of the _data files and the AUP files into the folder – I think the problem was that they were too far from one another, though I am still not sure why that first error continues to happen and I’ve backed it all up. (there was nothing in the “open recent” once that problem occurred)

You’re suggestion to keep the files together solved it! Thank you!