Last Straw: Saving, recovering, opening moved or renamed project file

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
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1

I have been noticing more and more over the past few months an inability for Audacity to successfully save and reopen projects without there being some kind of crash and recovery cycle required.

For general organization and housekeeping I renamed a project and also made a backup. Neither of these will open. Audacity cannot find them. This is a huge worry, waste of time, productivity, and undermines my confidence in using this software going forward.

Audacity is 25 years old? Why are fundamental tasks like reading and writing its own project files still continually a problem?

I am not a software developer. I cannot write code and prefer to not tinker under the hood of my Mac’s operating system to get this to work. I don’t have the expertise or the time. For the record here is the (to me) undecipherable “problem details report”. Hopefully this will help another Audacity victim.

As for me? I’m now stuck trying to get the project to open using other means, ($$$$?) or spending an entire month re-recording this project.

{

"timestamp": 1763213363,

"event_id": "01b59efa97654f7ebc826ffb7752a017",

"platform": "native",

"release": "audacity@3.7.5",

"contexts": {

    "os": {

        "type": "os",

        "name": "Macintosh",

        "version": "26.1.0"

    }

},

"exception": {

    "values": \[

        {

            "type": "File_Error",

            "value": "Audacity failed to read from a file in /<path>ACX - <path>.",

            "mechanism": {

                "type": "runtime_error",

                "handled": false,

                "data": {

                    "sqlite3.rc": "11",

                    "sqlite3.context": "SqliteSampleBlock::Load::step"

                }

            }

        }

    \]

}

}

2

Audacity 3.7.x does obviously not like earlier projects (that is what I’ve learned in this forum). Therefore you should open any project file with the version which you used to create it.

Well, if you moved them - how should Audacity know where they are? You can try double-clicking the project file, this should invoke Audacity and load the file. Or you can use the “Open…” command in the menu and search for the file in your directories.

Did you not export a sound file of your work (WAV, AIFF, or any other lossless format)? You should really do this.

Please also read @DVDdoug ’s statement here.

3

I don’t know why you’re having so much trouble but since you’re on a Mac, maybe try GarageBand.

Or ocenaudio, or there lots of DAWs that run on a Mac but DAWs are more complex and most aren’t free.

1 Like
4

It isn’t one problem.

For the first 20 years there was a recurring problem opening projects, but it was not due to any kind of “bug” - it was essentially “user error”. For Audacity versions 1.x and 2.x, an Audacity project had two distinct parts - the “.aup” project file, and a separate “_data” folder containing the audio data. From time to time, users might lose, move, delete, or modify the “_data” folder, not realising its importance (it contained the audio data), and that would break the project.

One of the last major changes to Audacity before it was taken over by muse group was to implement a “unitary project format”. This was to address the problems of projects being “broken” in this way - by combining the audio data and the project structure within a single “.aup3” file made it impossible to accidentally loose the audio data.

Unfortunately, since then, there have been multiple issues causing .aup3 projects to break.

An additional problem is that recent projects often require a specific version of Audacity 3.x or they won’t open. Compatibility between different versions of Audacity 3 is extremely limited.

The moral of the story is that it is now more important than ever to make WAV (of FLAC) format backups of all recordings as soon as possible.

1 Like
5

Would be a good idea. I am a Mac user since the Mac Plus came out, so I should know how Apple programs work. But I don’t (except iTunes / Music). I never succeeded to record anything useable using GarageBand… In contrast to GarageBand, Audacity is “straight-forward” and intuitive.

6

Thank you so much for your reply.

Yes I tried opening the moved / renamed file from its new location several ways . Yes I saved it lossless to other drives.

That’s not the same as having access to the actual .aup project files.

Fortunately I did back it up to the audio.com cloud and was able to recover that. We are talking about an entire morning of trying to get Audacity to work. The renamed / moved files are, seemingly, lost forever. That’s the end of the road for me. Audacity’s developers are well-meaning, hard-working and diligent. But not being able to open a renamed project? Sorry: not a feature, it’s a BUG. A very bad one.

7

Yes indeed to all of what you wrote.

Yes indeed, as in: great list of reasons why I am not a candidate to be using Audacity and should switch to another platform. Am I perhaps trading one set of bugs for another? Yes. Perhaps. It’s a gamble I need to take.

8

GarageBand is not a viable idea for me as I am recording audio books. No music. Audacity, WHEN IT WORKS, is, I agree “straight forward” and intuitive.

Break my files, lose my work? It’s not working.

9

You might be describing the problem What’s the show? How long or complicated is it?

That’s you running out of drive space. This was a big deal at the dawn of video production when people with modest computers discovered how drive intensive video really was.

Editing a large Audacity show can get crazy large. Every time you perform an edit, Audacity makes a backup copy of the whole show. So your two-hour stereo show is getting copied and copied and copied at each edit.

The recommendation is to create the show in segments—don’t try to crank it out all at once.

But, I can hear you say, I’m live editing on External, Network, Internet, or Cloud Drives. Stop that. Audacity doesn’t get along with drives not inside the machine.

The only possible exception is that audio.com service. Jury’s out on the stability of that system. There have been a lot of forum postings about problems, and I understand it’s a fully integrated application on your machine, not just drive space made available. Hard to work around it.

So if you edit your show in smaller chunks, you can store the chunks anywhere you like, move them into the local drive and then edit them. That’s my silly joke of putting your show anywhere you like, you just can’t let Audacity catch you doing it.

In the older forum service, there were posters who would complain about crashing. It would turn out that their Audacity crashed constantly and they were only complaining about the last one because it’s the only one they couldn’t recover from. Clean the machine.

My Audacity has never crashed.

Koz

10

I appreciate your reply, and congratulate you on your Audacity never having crashed.

Unfortunately though, none of your explanation is my responsibility. That’s just bad software design. As I wrote elsewhere: another good reason for me to not use Audacity

11

Also see above about Recording some live material and then immediately Exporting it as Perfect Quality, Stable WAV (Microsoft) files. Having a Project crash forever should not send you back to coffee, studio, and microphones. Start over with your carefully recorded and backed-up WAV files.

Koz

12

not the same as having access to the project files. Great idea though. Again, not my job to kluge together a workflow to make up for someone else’s lack of attention to a critical problem.

13

Post back when you get something to work. Try Ocenaudio.

This is a forum, users helping each other, not a corporate help desk.

Koz

14

Thank you for the suggestion.

15

Is there one?

16

No, and the the Developers almost never come around.

Koz