I have a large file (437 MB) of a continuous dance mix that I loaded into Audacity in order to insert track labels. So far, so good.
When I export as a MPG file using “Export Multiple,” everything seems to work – until Audacity gets to the last few track labels. I then get the error “could not locate target file for writing” and no files are produced for the remaining track (nos. 39-43). This seems VERY strange to me since there is only one master file and the previous 38 labels were created as separate files without a problem.
Is there a file-size limitation or am I doing something wrong? I’d like very much to keep the mix as it is.
Check that you have not used punctuation marks in the label text of any of those last labels. In particular, slashes and colons can cause problems, but it is safest to avoid any non-standard characters (general advice for compatibility is to use numbers, letters, hyphen and underscore only).
I do use parens and a special symbol as a separator, but that doesn’t seem to affect the first 38 markers. I’ll try editing the labels and see if that helps, but not sure why it would work for most of the file and not the last few labels.
Renaming the labels didn’t solve the problem – I still get the “can’t open source file for writing” error message as of label 39.
I tried cutting the first 3/4 of the file while in Audacity in the hopes that the final tracks would write separately, but that didn’t seem to work because it exported the whole file instead of individual files.
It’s no different from the first 38 labels I placed in the file to denote track markers, but it’s where Audacity stops the Export Multiple process and gives me the “can’t open file source” error message.