Project save failure

Audacity 3 Help Forum
1

I recently upgraded from Audacity 2.3.3.0 to Audacity 3.7.4 (it’s been a while), running on a Mac OS X Sequoia. I’m a rather casual user, and my main project is converting a batch of old concert tape recordings, mostly from the 70s, and I was grabbing another saved .wav file to convert.

Everything went fine until I went to save it, and was prompted for a project name. No problem, but when I tried to save again, there was no previous version, and I had to enter it again. I was able to successfully export an MP3 version, but the project would never save.

Looking at the destination directory, I found that I could see the file get created and grow, then disappear, with no error message or any indication of failure. This was in the same location where I’d stashed project files under the previous version.

The answer turned out to be simple but very unobvious. I keep pretty much everything on an external NAS drive, which is mounted via an SMB connection. There’s apparently a file size limit, in this case 8 GB (which might vary depending on implementation). The single file created by Audacity 3.7.4 exceeded that size, while the prior version had lots of smaller files.

The simple fix was to save project files on my local drive, which was also much faster as it’s an SSD, though of course I’ve got less available space. The bug is just that the failure is unreported, which I hope will get picked up in a future revision.

A great product. Kudos to the Audacity team.

2

@LWinterberg

Does this need logging on GitHub as an issue?

Peter.

3

Probably, if it’s ever going to get fixed. I’ve never done that, though, was sort of hoping that the forum was mmonitored and somebody was picking up on those things.

4

System Requirements

It’s OK to copy AUP3 files to/from a network/cloud/thumb drive but it likes to work “live” with a local internal NTSF or ExFAT (or whatever MacOS uses).

And I always advise keeping a WAV or FLAC file whether you make a project file or not because they are “simpler” and more robust than AUP3 files.

5

Thanks for the additional info, always good to know. In this case, I suspect the limitation is something other than speed, as I’m using an office-level RAID box with fast drives on a 1-Gb wired Ethernet, but no matter. The SSD is clearly a better option.

6

Just ran into this issue as well. I am not using a NAS (looking into setting one up in the future) and I AM saving to the local drive on the laptop. I’ve run in to some weird quirks. Like it keeps trying to save it into a OneDrive even when I specifically tell it not to, it even does it when I make sure OneDrive isn’t one of the folders in the destination directory.

So the prompt the comes up is “XYZ File not found” right. But I am trying to save a new file and call it XYZ, not FIND a file XYZ. So something I tried was changing the name of a test file I already had saved and no longer needed to XYZ, and then I tried saving my new project in the same folder and with the same name. Almost worked. I got a prompt asking if I wanted to overwrite the existing file, click yes, wait about 30 seconds, and then BAM! Still doesn’t work.

Any suggestions at this point would be PHENOMENAL.

Thank you in advance.

7

A couple of settings you can check -

Edit → Preferences → Directories
All of my default directories are blank and temporary storage is local and whatever Audacity assigned by default.

and…
Edit → Preferences → Cloud
I’ve selected Always Save To Computer.

And you have to make an AUP3 project if you don’t need one. I usually just export as WAV or FLAC, or to whatever format I want. (If you’re going to re-open it for editing, DON’T save your temporary files as MP3 or other lossy format because you’ll end-up going-through multiple generations of lossy compression.)

1 Like
8

I appreciate this, and it did lead me to settings I haven’t previously explored. I had to revert to a previous version, 3.7.2, because I had to get work done and this bug mad Audacity literally (actually and not figuratively) unusably broken.

In the version I’m on now those settings are all as you described. If I update again to the latest version I can’t open files I’ve recorded on a previous version correct? because we (husband and wife team) are narrating a book for audible/ACX right now. She does the narrating of multiple chapters while He is at his day job, and the He edits later. So right now we have a back log of a few chapters that need editing and we don’t want to possibly lose those if we update to the new version again.