WRITE-PROTECT

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I have been using Audacity for many years on my Win 7 computer. I always save my files from Audacity on an external USB Hard Drive. Suddenly a few weeks ago, I could not write to that USB drive, Audacity would give me an error that it could not write to the disk it was “Write-protected.” I researched how to take off that feature on the USB drive but could not make any solution stick (also, it affected any external storage device and those devices could not be written to in any manner).

I finally figured out that by anti-virus program was preventing ME (but not Audacity!) from changing the windows registry to allow the drive to be written to. I rebooted into safe mode, changed the registry and hooray, my USB drives were back and could be written to. At that point I upgraded to Audacity 2.2.2 and for a while all was fine.

However, it is now doing it again, about every 3rd or 4th time I record something. I know it is Audacity causing the problem, mainly because it only happens when I am actively using Audacity. It is simply annoying that every few days I have to reboot to safe mode to get my drives to work. Please let me know if anyone has any ideas as to why this is happening and if there is a setting I need to change. Thanks.

2

I don’t know what’s happening but I’m pretty sure it’s not Audacity.

3

Official release versions of Audacity do not directly use the Windows registry.

There is an option when Audacity is first installed, that asks if you want to associate Audacity Projects with Audacity. If you select “Yes”, then Audacity sets a registry entry that associates .AUP files with Audacity. When this option is set, double clicking on an .AUP file tells Windows to launch Audacity with the file name as a parameter. As far as I’m aware, this is the only thing that Audacity does with the Windows registry.

Audacity’s settings and configuration data are stored in configuration files, not in the Windows registry.

If you obtained Audacity from anywhere other than via the official download links (https://www.audacityteam.org/download/windows/), we cannot guarantee the authenticity. Unofficial sources could contain malware that could mess up your computer. See this article regarding online safety: https://www.audacityteam.org/download/online-safety-when-downloading/