Plethora of annoying issues with Audacity- HELP!

[Michaeln]

I have some serious problems with audacity never before experienced.

I went and downloaded the latest version of audacity on the audacity site and opened a new project. I use Windows XP on a Toshiba Satellite (not sure about the model but it's about 3 years old). There is no real reason why Audacity should give me the trouble described below ( I have been using audacity on another laptop for 2 years).

As mentioned, i opened a new project and imported 3 MP3 files into it, as 3 tracks. I edited those 3 tracks, cutting bits out, copying and pasting stuff, just the normal things I usually do with audacity and what the software was designed for.

I spent many, many hours yesterday working on that project and then, when it was time to save it I tried to save it (the way I have done it a million times). However, I got the error message "File is not writable or disk is full". I ended up deleting/ moving 6 Gigabytes of stuff in the end because I kept getting that error message no matter what I tried, so it is not a full disk issue at all! There is plenty of memory and space.

Since it is not a full disk, ...Why would it not be writeable?????

As I had to leave the house, I had no other option but to save the project (not as an audacity project) but as a WAV file). This sucked as i was not finished editing.

So it saved it as a WAV file (combining all 3 tracks into 1 of course, as it would).....Then I tried to play the WAV. It Played.....BUT WITH NO SOUND. The file was there, it showed the length of the file and it played it...but totally mute. The sound is on and on full volume, there is no reason why it should be mute, other than that the file is corrupt and whatever else in the world is wrong with it all... Now I do not know what to do, as I had to shut my laptop down before I left the house, and with it, of course, the project. I spent an ENTIRE DAY MORNING TIL MIDNIGHT WORKING ON THIS PROJECT> Please help.

[kozikowski]

<<<"File is not writable or disk is full">>>

It's not the "Disk Full" part that was killing you, it was the "File Not Writable." You can get that if you put punctuation marks in the filename. Upper and lower case letters, numbers, underscore and dash. That's it. No other characters should appear in a filename. A favorite problem is to put a date in. They should be written 20090925, never 9/25/09.

<<<it showed the length of the file and it played it>>>

Did the green sound meter bounce and was there a blue waveform, like this...?

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_playback.jpg

Have you ever Exported (not saved) a WAV sound file and played it on this machine before? Windows may be trying to send your play sound out to the turntable or some other oddball problem. Windows is easily confused. Do you have blue waves?

Koz

[Michaeln]

Hi thanks so much for your answer. Yes, you are right, i did give it names that are probably not compatible then. How could I know that this would give me gray hairs overnight.
As for your question about wave forms: Well, when I said "it played back" I meant it played back in WMP, it never opened audacity again. So to recap: I was in audacity and selected"save as" and then saved it as a WAV into my music folder. It exported it and theWAV file was there as a WIndows Media File in my music folder. (Like I said I could not save my project as audacity). Then I clicked on that and it played in the WMP (windows media player) but with no sound.

I have done some research and found that ll this is known error in certain versions of audacity. All i know is I went on the audacity site and downloaded what seemed to be the latest version so these errors should have been fixed in that version, right??

The real odd thing is that when reading up bout this issue everyone mentions this happens with uncompressed files such WAV when they are imported into Audacity. Well I had these WAV files converted to MP3 (as the hour long WAV files swallowed up 1.2 Gigs each per track and I had 3 ). So I went and turned those files into MP3's and only then imported them into the audacity project. So I wonder why I still had the known error despite using MP3 format. Anyway, as you said the file nme is probably what made this go so wrong.

So let me know what you think about the strange 'mute' phenomenon when playing the WAV back or any other ideas.


Thanks for your help so far!!!

[kozikowski]

<<<errors should have been fixed in that version, right??>>>

Well, no because the developers don't always consider them errors. You think you downloaded a WAV editor. The developers are designing an Editorial Production Environment Manager. No small difference there.

<<<selected"save as" and then saved it as a WAV into my music folder.>>>

We need to get left-brain critical here. Audacity will not "Save" sound files. It only saves Projects. Projects only work right back in Audacity again and not always even then. You need to Export to get a sound file.

Windows makes finding problems very difficult because they intentionally hide information that could help you. If this gets too crazy, I'll tell you how to force Windows to show you file extensions.

Go into Audacity Preferences and change them to 44100, 16-bit, Stereo from wherever they are now. They may be 32-bit or Mono instead of stereo. When you set the new numbers, restart Audacity to make sure they stick.

Make a really simple recording. "Come here, Watson, I need you!!" Export As WAV and name the file. If Audacity starts asking you for "meta-data" like author or song titles, OK your way around the window.

See if that new test file doesn't open up everywhere.

Koz

[Michaeln]

Hi Koz, thanks again.

Ok I will try all of this when I get home in a couple of hours. Btw last night I attached a massive drive to my laptop as I still thought it was a space issue. I know that during my saving experiments I managed to save "something" to that. the reason i say something , is I am not sure what it was. I went in my audacity project and selected save as and then selected 'save as (name I chose)" and then it did just take a few seconds (which was odd) and actually saved. When I checked in that drive I saw the audacity icon with the name I hag=d given it, but at the time could not open it as I still had the actual audacity open (it won't let you open 2 at the same item). I will check later if the project saved there. i somewhat doubt it though. It took just a few seconds and it seemed too quick. The icon says in its properties that it is just a few KB, so that is weird..usually when you successfully save an audacity project and check the size it will give you something larger and more realistic. My tracks are 1 hour long each. However, in that same drive I saw a new folder had been automatically created and contained "audacity data" (loads of small windows WMP icons), so maybe that is the project I tried to save.

By the way, when I first started this project I still tried to import WAV into audacity, which ate my laptop alive. For some weird reason the actual file I was importing was let's say 173 MB but when I imported just that file my memory on my C drive had been dimimished by 1.2 Gigs!!!!! At first I didn't notice that but later I kept running into 'low memory' warnings and saw that I had 0 memory left in the C drive!!! Then I changed the format to MP3 but the same thing happend. I have 3 tracks that are each 1 hour long. I want to simply put them in audacity, align them and edit them simultaneously, so nothing special or too complicated.

But still it "zapped" tons of memory so that I was forced to split the tracks into smaller units. so when i started with the first smaller batch, I already ran into size issues again, despite them being MP3's. That is sooo weird.

I hope later I will be able to work it all out. Hope you will still be online later on. Thanks again, Koz.

[kozikowski]

<<<That is sooo weird. >>>

OK, that's enough of that. Let's change Windows so you can see what's actually there instead of what Windows would like you to believe is there. Most of what you said in the last post is bogus, broken, or misleading.

Right-Click My Computer > Explore > Tools > Folder Options > View

Deselect "[ ] Hide Extensions for Known File Types."

Apply to All Folders. Apply. Close the window.

Now the next time you go looking for music files the names will have a three-letter extension. piano2.wav and piano2.mp3. Guess what kind of music files those are? Forget the Windows icon pictures.

The Audacity _DATA folder will have a bunch of AU files, not Windows Media. Let us know when you succeed.

Koz

[Michaeln]

Thanks so much, i will try that and let you know. You are so helpful, I really appreciate it. From what I can see already and with you opening my eyes to it, Windows is a heck of a pain ...I never knew any of those things you told me. Ok will try that and then be in touch!

[kozikowski]

Windows is OK if everything goes right, but if it doesn't, the system is heavily biased to grind itself straight into the mud.

Koz

[Michaeln]

Ok, I am about to try making the changes and doing the test you suggested. When I went into the start menu, in "documents" it gives you recent documents, one of them being the audacity project I am trying to find as I still have hopes it saved somewhere. So when I try and open that, I , of course, get this message:
"can't open file'E:AudacityMy Music1-ABC CD 1 new 9-24_datab12783.au'(error 2:the system cannot find the file specified.)

Could that mean that the project was in fact saved somewhere? Anyway, I will try the experiment and get back to you.

[Michaeln]

Hi, test done. You asked me to try the following :
"Go into Audacity Preferences and change them to 44100, 16-bit, Stereo from wherever they are now. They may be 32-bit or Mono instead of stereo. When you set the new numbers, restart Audacity to make sure they stick.

Make a really simple recording. "Come here, Watson, I need you!!" Export As WAV and name the file. If Audacity starts asking you for "meta-data" like author or song titles, OK your way around the window.

See if that new test file doesn't open up everywhere."

I did exactly as I was told and it worked fine. I was not asked anything about Meta-data or anything else. I saved it under a simple name, as instructed.

I would to try and see if my work was somehow saved.

Again, when I click on the audacity icon that I managed to save the project opens in Audacity- but instead of 3 tracks with wave form I see 3 tracks with long thin lines, so basically silence. Then the error message described earlier pops up:
"can't open file'E:AudacityMy Music1-ABC CD 1 new 9-24_datab12783.au'(error 2:the system cannot find the file specified.)
(I later also exported it as a WAV file and that will only play as silent).
There is a data folder that was apparently created when I saved the project. It is empty though

So, what I need to know is: How can I find out if the project was saved somewhere anyway. And if so, how do I locate the data that should be there. After all, it did save something (ie 3 silent tracks, exact length of project). Why did save only the basic stuff? How do I avoid this stuation from re-occuring? Shall i use a different version? I guess it will be safer to save the project first and then start working, which is not how I did it first time round.

I just hope I won't have to do it all again.