I don’t remember exactly when or why, but at some point or another Audacity 4 crashed. Not really a big deal; crashes happen. Except now every time I open Audacity 4, I get greeted with a “The previous session quit unexpectedly” modal asking me whether I want to restore the session. If I press “no”… Audacity just closes immediately. No option to simply continue on with a new project or open a different one - Audacity just refuses to have anything to do with me if I don’t want to restore the session.
Okay, so I click yes to restore the session. This opens up an apparently random number of Audacity windows: one with Project A, one with Project B, a bunch more with empty projects, and a couple with no project in them at all - the “Project” tab is disabled, as are all the “Save”, “Close”, etc options in the File menu. Weird, but surely if I just go to File->Exit to quit Audacity normally, the “previous session quit unexpectedly” modal will stop popping up, right? Nope! The next time I try and open Audacity, the modal is still there. Okay, so I try to close each project individually. That’s fine for the empty project windows, but when I try to close Project A or Project B, Audacity just quits immediately, and the “previous session quit unexpectedly” modal is back as soon as I return. If the problem is that the project saved unsuccessfully, maybe I can save the projects and then exit? But no, saving them normally doesn’t eliminate the problem, and thanks to some other (related?) bug, trying to Save As either of those projects fails as it tells me the disk is full or inaccessible, neither of which is true. I can save those projects, and Save As does work fine for new projects, but Save As specifically does not work on these two projects. (I think it started when I tried to use a fade out effect on one of them and that gave me the “can’t save the file” error, though I can’t replicate that behavior, so I don’t really know.)
I seem to have eventually found a partial workaround: if I rename the project files on disk before opening Audacity, it can’t open them and only gives me a bunch of empty new project windows. After I close all of those, Audacity opens again without the modal. However, the moment I open up either Project A or Project B again, I still can’t Save As either one of them, and the modal comes back whenever I try and close and reopen one of them. So any time I want to edit either of those projects, I have to open it, make my edits, save it, close Audacity, rename the file, open Audacity again, select “yes, restore the project” from the modal, get an error message saying that it can’t find the project, close all the random new project windows that have popped up, and then reopen Audacity. Only then will it be back to normal.
I’m willing to put up with a bit of jank - though Audacity 4 has jank levels I’d associate with a beta or even alpha release, not a finished product - but this is pretty clearly not a sustainable workflow. I’m locked into v4 for these two projects, but the next time I need to start a fresh project, I’m opening Audacity 3.