I’m getting an error trying to open an Audacity file I made 10 years ago. At first, it was telling me to install ffmpeg, which I did. Now it’s just telling me it can’t import it and to try importing raw data, which only yields a silent file.
Any ideas? I’m on Audacity 3.6.1 on macOS 15.0. I’d love to recover the records I made. They were taken of a Sony MiniDisc I no longer have. The individual files are split up into many 1.1MB files in folders named, e.g., e0000a05.au.
That would have been Audacity 2.x rather than the current Audacity 3.x.
You could try uninstalling your current version of Audacity, and temporarily replacing it with one of the 2.x versions. Do whatever you need to do with the old project and ensure that you export a high quality WAV copy so that you can play it in other software. When you have finished with that project, you can update Audacity to a more recent version.
Old versions of Audacity are available from Old Audacity versions download
The most recent of the 2.x series is Audacity 2.4.2. I would expect this to be compatible with your old project, provided that you have both the “.aup” file and its associated “_data” folder, and they are both fully intact.
To use an .aup, you also need to have a similarly named folder with _data at the end of the name.
Newer versions of Audacity produce .aup3 files which include both of the old files.
Thanks. Looks like I might be out of luck. I downloaded 2.4.2 and tried to open the old files (which do include the _data folder, btw), but still get an error (a different one than before, though). It now says it’s a Audacity Project file and to open it using Open… (which I was). All the data files appear intact and I have 5 different projects I was hoping to be able to open and they all get the same error.
What is the exact wording in the error message?
“/Users/mic*********ney/Documents/MiniDisc recordings/Casio/Casio.aup” is an Audacity Project file. Use the ‘File > Open’ command to open Audacity Projects.
Here’s the files I have…
file: Casio.aup
folders: Casio_data > e00 > d00 … d05
files: e0000a05.au, etc.
Translation of your error message:
You should start Audacity first (not double-click the .aup file)
Then from the “File” menu, select the “Open…” command and navigate to the .aup file on your computer to open it.
The “_data”-folder needs to be in the same directory as the .aup file for Audacity to find it.
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