Hello. I guess the title says it all. When I began using Audacity about 5 years ago, I mistakenly thought I could change file names like I can in Word and other such data files. But I’m surprised that this is not the case with Audacity. It was five years ago that I made those changes and now I have come back to the projects and am finding flat lines running through my projects where there should be sound wave representations.
I cannot remember what the original file names were. Is there any way to bypass this and get into the data? If I could at least retrieve the original file names, then I think I could fix this. I’m wondering if I can access this in XML or some other format and view the original file names?
Windows still has NotePad, but it tends to screw up line endings, character encoding, and if you’re not careful it will change the file extension to “.txt”.
None of these problems happen with NotePad++.
I do not have the files in tow with me now. They are stored elsewhere. Just now, I made a test file and changed the names on both the aup file and data folder. I was able to open the aup file in wordpad and I see the project name. In this test, the name change did not affect the data access and I am able to work with the data. So why did the others not work? They were copied without the proper procedure to new folders, and moved around, and the names were changed, and since then, they appear as flatliners. I spose I can use the wordpad to regain the original project names and change them back in both the aup file and data folder? Or is it more complicated? And why is this name change test not resulting in flatliners?
In this test, the name change did not affect the data access and I am able to work with the data.
You mean when you changed the name and then changed it back, right? Yes, that’s expected to work. If you try to open a show with one simple name change, it will just simple not open. Audacity uses the contents of the AUP file to find the actual sound in the _DATA folder. It can’t even find the folder if the names don’t match.
since then, they appear as flatliners.
If the show opens flatline, then you may have had more than one problem. Go into the _DATA folder and find the individual AU sound snippets. Play one. They are real (short) sound files and they will play music.
Audacity Projects are not recommended for archive or safety backups. For that, Export WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit files.