This is just out of sheer curiosity.
I have a 2GB+ FLAC file. I also have the corresponding “.aup” and data files.
If I double-click the “.aup” file, Audacity (2.0.4) gets launched and the file opens in less than 2 seconds. It can be played and edited at will. Fine.
However, if I use drag & drop to (try to) open this same “.aup” file, Audacity does not open it and displays the following message:
Audacity did not recognize the type of the file ‘E:Multimedia LibraryChildren Of A Lesser GodChildren 2.aup’. If it is uncompressed, try importing it using “Import Raw”.
Now if I use “File | Import > Raw Data…”, Audacity does open the “.aup” file, but all I am getting is 2 big red tracks with no wave forms at all.
What gives? Would things be any different if I had Audacity version 2.0.5?
AUP is a text file with instructions what to do with all that stuff in the _data folder where the actual sound is. If you tell Audacity that it’s a sound file strange things will happen.
You can open up an AUP file with NotePad or TextEdit and read it. It’s words.
Open RAW will try to open floor sweepings into a sound performance. In that case, it’s up to you to tell Audacity the exact type and character of the file. Since it’s not sound, you can’t do that.
I kept Audacity 2.0.4 because of WDM-KS support. I never had any issues with Audacity 2.0.4.
If I double-click “.pls” or “.fpl” files, they get loaded into the associated application, i.e. Foobar2000. If I drag “.pls” or “.fpl” files into Foobar2000, they get loaded all the same.
I was expecting Audacity to be just as smart, i.e. to be able to identify its own “.aup” files, and deal with them as appropriate. I don’t see why double-clicking “.aup” files produces the expected result (the sound files are loaded), while drag & drop only brings about error messages or garbage.
I only wanted to report a minor blemish. This is basic programming: dragging in associated files should always produce same results as double-clicks on them.
Basically the developers are not prepared to fix this in the short term because it needs a lot of code restructuring.
Everything works if you use file open dialogues but there are a number of bugs with dragging files in of various types. Unofficial builds of Audacity are available where you can drag AUP files in - search this Forum.
So meantime I’ll treat this as a “feature request”.
It normally gets turned on in the early nightlies of the alphas so it can get some testing (it’s off again now in the latest 2.0.6 alpha as we hopefully prepare for release).
I was talking about Ed Musgrove’s custom builds where you can drag AUP files in and the export directory changes according to the directory the file comes from.