Apologies if this turns out not to be a new topic, but, trying to edit through OS X.5.8 with Audacity 2.0.3 with material on .aiff files recently recorded into Audacity 1.13 500 miles away, where I am not online and can’t easily update on a Mac OS X.5.1, not online, I find that 2.0.3. claims that the files “do not seem to be” .aiff. However Finder and the quick look feature on OS X.5.8 have no difficulty in regarding them as .aiff. There are time-consuming ways round this, but they are made mandatory by the refusal of OS X.5.8 in their case to open them in anything but Audacity 2.0.3,( - including Amadeus which quits if it is offered them , and Sound Studio, which doesn’t recognise them at all) where they are simply rejected.
I don’t know whether this is a Mac problem or an Audacity problem, but since the interface is clearly not what it should be I’m putting this problem forward as potentially at least an Audacity one.
I’m having trouble following this, so I’ll summarize what I think you’re saying and you can tell me if I’m right or wrong:
The original AIF files were created using Audacity 1.3.13 (certainly not 1.13, which does not exist), using a different computer than the one your are now trying to edit them on.
With OS X 10.5.8 (you wrote “X.5.8”), QuickLook correctly opens and plays the files.
Both Amadeus and Sound Studio reject the files on the 10.5.8 computer.
What is the size of the files? There is a chance that someone merely changed the extension of a .aup file to .aiff.
Thanks, but the somebody who changed the .aup files would have had to be me, and it wasn’t. I think this has actually turned out to be a Mac problem, which apparently transferred some at least of my external hard drive content - possibly just the portable ones with the .aiff material which was giving trouble on Audacity - to the Trash. Only the presence of a locked file on the desktop - which had not travelled 500 miles, but had stayed put there - stopped me innocently emptying the trash, and even that file wasn’t shown on the trash list. It just generated a refusal to empty the trash and a warning message. The only other that signifier was that the path indicators in Finder for the affected files began the path with the Trash icon. So I restarted the Mac, and the aiff problem vanished. The Trash icon stopped appearing in the Finder file paths. I’d like to know what caused it, but at least I now know one cure if it happens again. Thanks again for the help.