Intermittent error message: Unable to open target file

[em777]

Hi. I just started using Audacity the other day. I am having some trouble splitting files into tracks. After I label the tracks and click "export multiple," I will sometimes get an error message "unable to open target file for writing." Sometimes I get this immediately, and nothing exports. Sometimes some of the tracks will be sucessfully exported, and then I'll get the error message and the rest of the tracks don't get exported. Sometimes all my tracks export successfully. I don't see any rhyme or reason to it, and I am baffled.

When I do get the error message, trying again has not worked. Closing and restarting Audacity has not worked. Even shutting down the computer and restarting and trying again has not worked. Nor has changing the directory. I have gotten around the problem by selecting each section individually and exporting it as an mp3, but that means my original labeling is wasted and I have to redo all the track titles.

I am using Vista and exporting the tracks as mp3 files. Can anyone help? Thanks.

[steve]

You may be using illegal characters for the file names.
Note that on Windows, if you try to save a file as "test 15/08/10.mp3" it will fail because slashes are not allowed by Windows in file names. There's a whole load of characters and names that you need to avoid - see here for the full list: http://alturl.com/8ydjd

[em777]

Hmm. This is a possibility, as there may have been a few titles with question marks. I will have to check to see if that is the issue. Thanks so much for giving me an avenue to investigate.

[kozikowski]

Question Marks have meaning to Windows, too.

The list of universal perfect characters is pretty simple: Upper and lower case letters, numbers, underscore and dash. That's it. All other characters can get you into hot water in one or more of the various operating systems. The evil characters aren't always deadly on all computers, but those characters are the ones we tell people to use if they're not sure. If your show starts working.... then you win.

Koz

[steve]

Upper and lower case letters, numbers, underscore and dash.

On Windows you also need to be careful of certain upper case letter combinations - someone wrote in recently about a problem with "Export Multiple" and it turned out that he was splitting a track based on "lyric" labels. Unfortunately he had entered the label text all in upper case and one of the labels was "CON" (which is an illegal file name on Windows).