Audacity Forum

I have used Audacity for three years without much of a problem until now. My 2 year old Dell D810 XP laptop died. I hired someone to retrieve my data and put it on an external USB drive, which was done successfully. I called Dell and re-installed XP successfully. I moved the data that I use often from the external drive back to my laptop hard drive successfully.

I downloaded Audacity 1.2.6 and installed it on my computer. Now when I playback a file, it takes a couple of seconds after clicking the play button before play begins and then sometimes the audio will skip or freeze. All other programs work (Word, Excel, Photoshop, etc.) so I don't think XP re-installation is the problem.

Does anyone know what is going on?

<<<Does anyone know what is going on?>>>

Yes. You can't move Audacity Projects. Unless you Exported As WAV several times in the production process to get a single stable sound file, you are stuck with an Audacity Project which consists of an AUP supervisory file, a _DATA folder with billions of little AU files in it which may or may not be sound, and, depending on what you were doing, thousands of other files sprayed all over your machine. Unless you get all those files back in their original folders and drives, the AUP file will either not find them at all, or have a terrible time doing it.

This is a very simple AUP file. Note that it points to a folder on the hard drive. If that file isn't in that exact folder, the show is dead. Zoom in and scroll around.

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

Also note that the AUP file is generally written in two almost identical segments. The upper segment is Left and the lower Segment is Right. They don't have to point to the same files.

Ths makes recovering from a crash very entertaining.

<<<I downloaded Audacity 1.2.6 and installed it on my computer.>>>

Did you start out with Audacity 1.2.6? Do you remember all of the imported or opened sound files or clips you used in your original project? If you can find all those files and put them back exactly where they used to be, you may be able to pull this one out of the fire.

Koz