Missing data files on OS 10.15.7

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
1

I have just had an extremely frustrating few hours … I have been labelling audio files in Audacity for a client, but when I came to send the files, I could only find the .aup files, not the _data files. They were nowhere on my hard drive, never mind in the same folder as the .aup files. (I’m running Catalina, OS 10.15.7.)

To cut a long story short, I upgraded Audacity to 3.1 and my client upgraded her version too, and she was able to read the .aup file without needing the parallel data file. So I have no idea what Audacity have done (apart from bringing me to the point of tears, thinking that I’d completely wasted the past three days), but it seems that only one file is now needed.

Just thought I’d post that here in case anyone else is pulling their hair out trying to find files that aren’t there. Try upgrading the software :wink:

2

Older versions of Audacity used a multi-file project file. There was a “.AUP” file, plus a “_data” folder containing the audio data as many small .AU files.

Audacity 3.x uses a new single file format for project. A project is now self contained in a single .AUP3 file.

More information on the website: https://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-3-0-0-released/
and in the manual: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/updating_from_audacity_2.x_to_audacity_3.html and https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/audacity_projects.html