Win 7 Context menu “Open With” Doesn’t Work with Audition 3.1.0
Was working fine with Audition 2.x and all my other programs. Just upgraded to 3.1.0 and the program opens fine and works fine if I directly run the program .exe file or shortcut, however if I try to open audacity by right-clicking on an audio file (eg. an mp3, flac, wav, or m4a file), then selecting the context menu “Open With” option, when I then “Browse” to Audacity.exe (in C:\Program Files\Audacity) and select it, nothing happens! I’m back at the “Open With” page showing other programs but not Audacity. Windows apparently has an issue with the .exe and not allowing me to open any files using the Open With function. I have been using dozens of audio programs for many years on this PC and never seen this happen. Any ideas how to fix or do I need to just go back to 2.x? Thank you
If you must use an obsolete operating system, then I think going back to Audacity 2.x is your best option.
If Audacity 2.4.2 runs well on your system, use that. You can get it here: Old Audacity versions download
If you don’t want to, or cannot update to Windows 10 / Windows 11, it may be worth switching to a modern version of Linux. “Xubuntu” works well with older computers: https://xubuntu.org/
Xubuntu still uses Audacity 2.x but will update eventually.
I uninstalled the 64 bit version and then installed the 32-bit version of Audacity 3.1.1 and everything works perfectly now. Audacity now shows up by default in the Open With context menu.
FYI I still use Win7 because it does everything I need and there is one program (Adobe Audition 1.5) that is very old and probably won’t run on Win 10+. Also as Linux devs know, M$ is garbage and I would prefer to not support their latest bloatware. I run Linux for some other things but not for my audio PC as there are unfortunately there are too many programs not available on Linux eg. Audition and Ableton Live.
