MacOS Catalina, problem with Macros/Files option

Greetings all. I have a frustrating issue: I have a simple macro that I would like to run on N mp3 files. I have tested it on an individual file and it appears to work. But when I select it in Macros pane and hit the Files button, nothing happens. There is no popup that allows me to navigate among folders and choose files to which I want to apply this macro.

Sometimes the Files button seems to do nothing at all. At other times it causes a spinning beachball. Sometimes the OK button seems to activate itself after I hit the Files button. But I never get a file chooser popup.

It’s quite mysterious and very frustrating, as I have over 20 mp3 files to which I want to apply identical processing – doing it by hand is going to be tedious (although tbf I have probably spent almost as much time trying to get the batch processing to work, as it would have taken to process them by hand – grrrr).

PS my version of Audacity is a bit older, 2.3.2 – is this a known bug in earlier versions? I am afraid to try to update Audacity because my OS is also a bit out of date, and this is a Hackintosh so an OS upgrade might be disastrous. I don’t want to break the mostly-working Audacity that is currently installed.

At least Audacity version 2.4.2 should run under Catalina; I am using it on an old MacBook Air with High Sierra.

You can have multiple versions of Audacity installed on your computer.

First, rename your current version to “Audacity 232”.

Next, download Audacity 2.4.2 from here. Scroll way down!

Open the DMG and drag Audacity to your Applications folder. Rename it to “Audacity 242”.

You can do this with any older version if you want to see if they will work on your machine.

Beware that starting with Audacity 3.0.0 the new, “unified” file format is used (and the files have extension “aup3”) which is not backwards compatible with version 2 files. Also beware that as new preferences are added you may experience some odd interface changes when switching between a very old version and a very recent version.

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