Error Opening Project...

[tabs672]

Hey there! I've been using Audacity for quite some time now, and I've just encountered my first real problem. Earlier this evening, I was editing a project on my home computer, and I saved and exited the program. When I came back to it, the .aup file won't open, and Audacity generates the error message "Error: no element found at line 2824". I was wondering if there is any way to fix the problem and get the project back. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-T

[kozikowski]

I'm pretty sure I know the character of the error. You know the AUP file is computer programming, right? It's not a sound file. You can open it up in NotePad (or WordPad) and read it.

Here's a simple one as a picture.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/aup1.jpg

That's XML programming language and it has a structure and syntax. It's actually not that hard to read; there's a lot of English words in it.

"All you have to do," is open yours up, count down three thousand lines, find the error, correct it, and save the file. Piece of cake, right?

I've never met your particular error before, but it almost has to be a tag like <waveblock> or <sequence> either misspelled or with bogus data between the tags. NotePad will not number the lines for you, but there are programming editors that will. We need to wait for one of the Windows elves for that one.

We should probably find out what Audacity did that. Are you running out of hard drive space? Are you sure? How big was the show? Three thousand lines of code might be a two-hour long show with a million effects in it. My sample is a six second show with no effects.

Koz

[kozikowski]

Also, from that example, the top half of the code is for Stereo Left and the bottom half is for Stereo Right. Any changes you make to one have to be made to the other.

Obviously, you weren't intended to manage and edit this file, although you can. Tags are start and stop labels like this:

<name> Koz </name>

[tabs672]

Aha. That was the problem...I was trying to fix the edit in notepad, and the lines weren't spaced correctly. I switched over to crimson editor, and fixed it rather quickly. The problem was, for some reason, the </project> tag had been omitted. Thanks for the tip!

[alisdfd]

I have the same problems
i dont know anything about crimson editor can u direct me to a website that will help
thanks

[steve]

What is the exact error message that you are getting?

[alisdfd]

it says
Couldn't find the project data folder :"Nardo Ranks Dem a bleach.aup.bak_data


how do i let it recognise this data its in the same place i think it is the software
help please

[steve]

Well it's a different problem - in this case Audacity can't find the data that belongs with the project, but the thing that says there is more to this story is the name of the folder that it can't find "Nardo Ranks Dem a bleach.aup.bak_data".

So what's the story? You were recording something and you saved the project as "Nardo Ranks Dem a bleach"? What happened then?

Do you have a file called "Nardo Ranks Dem a bleach.aup" and a folder called "Nardo Ranks Dem a bleach_data"?

You know that an Audacity project is made of two parts - and AUP file, and a folder full of data? See here, this is a really important concept: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/File_Management_Tips

[kozikowski]

Did you try to move the show from one computer to another? We tell people you can't move Audacity projects because more often than not, you can't.

Koz