Problem opening old projects (1.x) in Audacity 3.7.3

[dgersic]

I have a collection of projects created in an old version of Audacity. I need to work with some of them, and am finding that Audacity 3.7.3 errors when trying to open them. I get a message like:

Error while processing /home/dgersic/tmp/Audacity/Rock/Styx/Caught In The Act_data/b00000.au

Inserting silence.

I see this was asked, but nobody answered:

"Error while processing file [x] - Inserting Silence"

I’m trying to open some old Audacity projects, but when I do, I get the following error message: “Error while processing file Folder/Song data.b00000.au - Inserting Silence” All I’m left with is a few tracks of silence which are only a few seconds long. Is there any way to rescue these projects?

Reading the FAQs and such, it is not clear if Audacity 3.x is supposed to be able to open these projects. I see that a 1.0 project should not be possible, but I see several references to 3.x being able to open a 1.x project.

I did some digging, and the AUP file is just XML and contains what looks like a version and Audacity version info here:

version=“1.1.0” audacityversion=“1.2.2”

I have some newer projects that do open correctly in Audacity 3, and it looks like somewhere between 1.2.2 and 1.3, the XML changed a bit. The 1.3 AUP projects open ok, the 1.2.2 AUP projects don’t.

The XML changes are pretty simple, and I have successfully hand-edited the AUP files to the 1.3 format and been able to then open them in Audacity 3.7.3. This is tedious, though, and I’m hoping that maybe you could fix the error so that the 1.2.2 format XML AUP files will open.

Somewhere in the FAQ I found references to installing Audacity 2.x and using it to open and convert the 1.x AUP files to the 2.x (probably 1.3) format, which should then be able to be opened in Audacity 3.x. That’s not an easy or straightforward thing to do since the 2.x versions are long deprecated.

If anybody else finds themselves in this particular problem, this is how I got it to work. It’s tedious.

Find your old 1.x AUP file and open it in a plain text editor. You’ll find something like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<audacityproject projname="Project_data" version="1.1.0" audacityversion="1.2.2" sel0="0.0000000000" sel1="0.0000000000" vpos="0" h="2096.8780045351" zoom="86.1328125000" rate="44100.000000" >
        <tags title="" artist="" album="" track="-1" year="" genre="-1" comments="" id3v2="1" />
        <wavetrack name="Audio Track" channel="0" linked="1" offset="0.00000000" rate="44100.000000" gain="1.000000" pan="0.000000" >
                <sequence maxsamples="262144" sampleformat="262159" numsamples="93004032" >
                        <waveblock start="0" >
                                <simpleblockfile filename='b00226.au' len='262144' min='-0.924741' max='0.011444' rms='0.018021'/>
                        </waveblock>

There are lots of <waveblock>...</waveblock> blocks. These are the *.au files in the project directory. You may find more than one block, depending on what your project represents. In my case, it’s a stereo recording of a vinyl album, and it has two <wavetrack> blocks representing the left and right channels (channel=0 and channel=1).

The <wavetrack> and <waveblock> parts are important. Keep those, and replace the rest with something like:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no" ?>
<!DOCTYPE project PUBLIC "-//audacityproject-1.3.0//DTD//EN" "http://audacity.sourceforge.net/xml/audacityproject-1.3.0.dtd" >
<project xmlns="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/xml/" projname="Project_data" version="1.3.0" audacityversion="1.3.12-beta" sel0="0.0000000000" sel1="0.0000000000" vpos="0" h="0.0000000000" zoom="86.1328125000" rate="44100">
        <tags>
                <tag name="id3v2" value="1"/>
        </tags>
        <wavetrack name="Audio Track" channel="0" linked="1" mute="0" solo="0" height="150" minimized="0" rate="44100" gain="1" pan="0">
                <waveclip offset="0.00000000">
                        <sequence maxsamples="262144" sampleformat="262159" numsamples="137593344">
                                <waveblock start="0">
                                        <simpleblockfile filename="b00000.au" len="262144" min="-0.007813" max="-0.003845" rms="0.005386"/>
                                </waveblock>

The lines before <wavetrack> I just copied from another (working) project and inserted in place of the older format. Note that under <wavetrack> there is now <waveclip>, but then the same <sequence> and <waveblock> sections. For a project (like mine) with multiple <wavetrack> blocks, each one now needs a <waveclip> block inserted to contain the <sequence> block.

Note that the “projname” must be the same as it was, this is the subdirectory that the *.au files are stored in.

Once you fix up the bottom of the file to correctly close the tags, like:

                                <waveblock start="137382400">
                                        <simpleblockfile filename="e0000db0.au" len="210944" min="-0.024659" max="0.014557" rms="0.001444"/>
                                </waveblock>
                        </sequence>
                        <envelope numpoints="0"/>
                </waveclip>
        </wavetrack>
</project>

you should be able to open your newly created / fixed / upgraded AUP project with Audacity 3.x and it will be converted to the new SQLite AUP3 format.

Disclaimer: I’ve done this to a couple of my projects so far, and it has worked for me. I have backups. I have extensive experience hacking at XML. Your milage and results may vary.

[waxcylinder]

This is what the manual says (and I know the tip regarding old projects works as I tested that whne I wrote that section long ago):

See this page in the manual:

Managing Audacity Projects - Audacity Manual

Peter

[Wrecks0]

XMLStarlet can automate updating XML files. It is very old and hasn’t been updated in a long time but it still works, except in one case that I know of. It will not understand elements that have attributes with no value.

So tags like this: <input disabled>
have to be changed to this: <input disabled="">
before a transformation can be performed.

[DVDdoug]

@dgersic

b00000.au

Does that file even exist? In the project’s directory with a bunch of other .au files?

[dgersic]

Audacity version 3.x should be able to open projects from Audacity 1.1 onwards - but not from 1.0

Exactly. Maybe it was true when that was written, but it doesn’t seem to be true now.

Assuming that the XML elements are correct, it works with 1.3 onwards, but 1.1 and 1.2 don’t work.

[dgersic]

Yes, the files are there. It’s strictly a problem of Audacity no longer being able to understand it’s ancient XML project file format.

Probably anybody that has a 1.x project still and hasn’t touched it in many years isn’t going to, so it’s likely to be a low impact problem.