I’m an Audacity novice … my friend and I are trying to use Audacity to exchange multitrack song ideas by long distance. Because of the size of the files, we decided to compress them using 7zip and place them in a dropbox that I have access to. It seems I should be able to simply download the compressed file, decompress it to a designated folder on my hard drive, open it and continue working with it.
However, when I do that, I get an error of "could not find the project data folder: (my folder name) when I click on the .aup file. It looks as though I need to specify a file path, but I can’t figure how to do that.
You didn’t send the show. You sent the AUP file which is a text file list of instructions how to construct the show from the contents of the _DATA folder which you apparently didn’t send. Send that, too.
I think there are several folders of data … when decompressed, it amounts to over 4 GB … the .aud file is quite small by comparison. I will read your link, thanks.
The _DATA folder is a large black plastic bag with the bits and pieces of the entire, whole, actual show. The AUP file is a text list of Audacity instructions about how to play the bag.
Here is an actual AUP file. You can open yours up and look at it in any text editor. It uses English-like words.
That’s why it’s so tiny. The actual heavy lifting is handled by the _DATA folder. _DO NOT change anything inside the DATA folder. That’s a sure way to destroy your show. The AUP file and the _DATA folder have to be in the same directory. The AUP file cannot search the computer. You may not put the AUP file inside the _DATA folder.
And yes, if you’re used to highly compressed internet download music, producing a high-quality multi-track, multi-performer song is going to be huge. Your uplink speed, which nobody has had to worry about until now, is suddenly going to be a big deal. Do Not produce music in M4A OR MP3 to get the smaller files. Those files get worse and worse as you produce your song until the final production may sound like a bad cellphone.
It’s totally worth doing, though. This is a sample of Josh sending a guide track to the other performers and the performers sent final high-quality music back to Josh so he could mix down into a final show.
He mixed the YouTube video to make the show look like a multi-point Skype Sync session, but it was a good deal simpler than that. Skype doesn’t do this all that well, anyway.
If your colleagues are on Mac or Linux, only use A to Z or a to z letters, whole numbers (0 to 9), underscore, hyphen-minus or NUMPAD_SUBTRACT to name the project.
Yes. You totally do not have to all be on the same computer type. With a little care you can do this on all three.
“Tell Hailey she needs to get her Mac in gear and insert the alto part. I need to do my Win7 virus update. It’s been complaining at me. Is your linux machine still a smoldering ruin? Will strong alcoholic beverages do any good?” (That’s rhetorical)
First, we were not allowing enough time for his files to upload to Dropbox, and they weren’t all being transferred to me. Second, he wasn’t saving his project to include some external audio loops he was using. Third, I didn’t have both the data folder and the AUP file in the same folder. Working well on all fronts now.
I appreciate the willingness of the forum to help problem-solve!