Missing External Drives

Audacity 3 Help Forum GNU/Linux
1

I’ve just reinstalled Audacity 2.3.3 after a hard drive crash. I’m using Linux/Ubuntu 18.04. (I have a dual boot system with Win 10 as the 2nd OS, and this problem does not exist on the Windows version of Audacity.) Although the Linux system is able to see, open and work with my two external hard drives, and before the crash Audacity had no problems finding them, the new Audacity installation sees only my local hard drive and files. I can save locally and copy globally, but it’s an extra step I’d like to avoid.

Any ideas would be appreciated.
Iraj

2

PS: I downloaded from the Audacity website and installed via terminal on my system.

3

What do you get if you run the “lsblk” command in a Terminal?

4

Here’s the result of lsblk. The Seagate and Iomega are the external drives.

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0 7:0 0 2.3M 1 loop /snap/gnome-calculator/180
loop1 7:1 0 55M 1 loop /snap/core18/1705
loop2 7:2 0 73.8M 1 loop /snap/audacity/599
loop3 7:3 0 86.9M 1 loop /snap/core/4917
loop4 7:4 0 13M 1 loop /snap/gnome-characters/103
loop5 7:5 0 140.9M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-26-1604/70
loop6 7:6 0 236M 1 loop /snap/kde-frameworks-5/27
loop7 7:7 0 132K 1 loop /snap/gtk2-common-themes/9
loop8 7:8 0 34.7M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/319
loop9 7:9 0 14.5M 1 loop /snap/gnome-logs/37
loop10 7:10 0 3.7M 1 loop /snap/gnome-system-monitor/51
sda 8:0 0 232.9G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 529M 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 100M 0 part /boot/efi
├─sda3 8:3 0 16M 0 part
├─sda4 8:4 0 48.2G 0 part
└─sda5 8:5 0 184.1G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 2.7T 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 2.7T 0 part /media/ira/Seagate Backup Plus Drive
sdc 8:32 0 2.7T 0 disk
└─sdc1 8:33 0 2.7T 0 part /media/ira/Iomega 3 TB
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom

5

First thing, I would recommend NOT opening Audacity Projects directly from an external drive. External drives are great for reading / writing big files, but not so good for low latency access of thousands of tiny files (such as Audacity data). They should be fine for importing / exporting audio files.

Have you tried (in Audacity):
“File menu > Import > Audio”
and navigating to:

/media/ira/Seagate Backup Plus Drive
6

Hadn’t before, but I just did try that and got “Could not read contents of Seagate Backup Plus Drive” and the following error message: Error opening directory ‘/media/ira/Seagate Backup Plus Drive’: Permission denied.

I went to the drive properties; I was already authorized to R/W. I edited ‘permissions’ to allow everyone access to read-write files. That made no difference in Audacity. Interestingly, the Audacity import choices for the Seagate drive show only a portion of the files, specifically recovered data files from my efforts to rebuild the crashed hard drive. Moreover, the only drive that’s listed in the ‘Import’ default screen is the Seagate. I manually entered the location of the Iomega, but got the same ‘can’t read’ and error messages.

Is there a ‘remap’ function in Audacity other than ‘import’?

Thanks for the continuing help.
Ira

7

When you last logged out of Windows, did you “safely remove” the drives and completely shut down Windows? If not, try that, then boot into Linux and see if there’s any difference.

8

I usually restart the computer to go from Win to Ubuntu and back, but I did a hard shutdown and there’s no difference. I should have responded to your point about running Audacity from an external drive: I don’t. Windows and Ubuntu have separate installations, both on the C drive in their respective partitions. So there’s no removal of discs.

9

What I’m wondering, is if Windows is “locking” the external drives in some way. That’s why I suggested doing a “safely remove” in Windows (to unmount the drives before shutting down Windows). It may make no difference, but a quick test could rule out that possibility.

10

The Linux system and all other programs on the system have no trouble finding the drives, and these are the same Windows and Linux versions I used before the crash. Anything is worth a try, though, but I’m running out of time right now. I’ll post again the next time I can get to the computer. Thanks again for the suggestions.
Ira

11

So I found a work-around: I opened one of the files on my external drives with Audacity. The “open with” drop down menu gave me two versions of the program (indistinguishable from each other in that menu.) I chose one, Audacity opened, but gave me an error message that it couldn’t find the folder/file. I chose the other, and voila, I was in business, and was able to edit and save it to either of the external drives. I’ll have to learn how to find the two versions and eliminate the balky one. Sounds like a Linux problem.

Thanks for your help.

12

iraj: I see you posted a work-around solution but I found the following settings in Ubuntu Focal (20.04 LTS) and thought they may help you or someone like me searching for a similar answer.

  1. Open Settings:
    GUI Desktop: Top right corner drop down menu

  2. Open Applications:
    GUI: Left pane menu

  3. Locate/Select Audacity
    GUI: Left pane menu

  4. Locate section: Permissions & Access
    GUI: Main settings panel

  5. Locate/Enable: Read/write files on removable storage devices
    nt: For my fresh Audacity installation this was “off/disabled” by default.
    If that is your state enable this setting.
    Close the settings panel

  6. Open Audacity, Select File, Open

  7. Select: “File System”

  8. Double-Click: “Media”
    This is where I found my external device within a directory named for my Ubuntu login user
    ex: file system/media/manningda/MyPassport

Hope that helps.

13

Thanks. I’ll see if it works as the default Audacity program is still the one that doesn’t point to the external drives.

Ira