error message

[wittlewooster]

Hello. When I try to open a project, I get an error message "error: not well-formed at line 3." Does anyone know what that means? Running Windows xp service pack 2 on a 2004 Dell computer. I forget the processor type, but it's an intel. Thanks. Robert.

[kozikowski]

That's.........a good one.

Restart your machine, launch audacity cold (no project). Tell it to record something live or generate a simple tone or download the piano trill from here:

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

..and save a new project. This is a test so don't go much over ten seconds if that.

Close Audacity. When you open it up again and open your new, fresh project, do you get the same error? I bet not. I believe that's the error of a faulty project (AUP) file. After your did your first damaged production, did you try to move any folders or files? Or "clean up a little?"

Let me know.

Koz

[wittlewooster]

Koz, Many thanks for your reply. I followed the procedure you recommended & opened my project with no problem. I think the problems were a missing project file (I did some premature house cleaning). Also, I did not move the project from the temp folder Audacity was using while it was running before I closed the program. I came to believe that's what I did when I read Richard Ash's response to a post about problems with .au.bak files.

I appreciate the help. It's taking me a while to learn how to get the hang of editing audio, but it's enjoyable. Robert.

[kozikowski]

In Audacity, "Save" will only produce a project, not a stand-alone music file.

Projects are "clouds" consisting of supervisory files, effects fragments, capture clips, original sound files, data folders, and the directory structure that holds them all together. If you move anything without moving the whole works, your show might easily turn into a pile of digital garbage. It makes me nervous when people start talking about the AU files. You should never be in that folder and should never touch or move any those files. Did you know the first two of those files are pictures and not sound? People are shocked when they find that sometimes, their original sound files are part of a project. They clean up all those unused or leftover files and reduce their project to junk.

This comes home to you very clearly when you find out what you have to do to Move A Project from one computer to another. This should terrify you. Chances of success are not good.

I suppose the joke here is that the sloppy editors walk away from an edit session with a working show. It's the compulsively neat people that dig themselves a hole.

Stoppit.

Koz

[wittlewooster]

Kos,

Being too neat with the computer is a lesson I seem to have to learn over & over. My projects so far have just been for learning the program, so I haven't lost anything important yet. I finished cleaning up everything done so far, properly saved my next projects and I don't monkey with anything. I have stop it.

Robert.