can't record a tape

[waxcylinder]

The problem comes when you actually start editing a Project. Should you, say, import a sound clip into your show, that clip, in its current location becomes part of the Project. You can Save Project all day long, but if you move that one clip, the show collapses.

Unless that is you take the trouble to reset your Audacity preferences so that on importing audio files the audio is copied into the the project rather than just referenced an pointed at. The copy option is not the default and therefore you are required to set it - the Copy option is marked as "safer" whereas the pointer option is marked as "faster" -which is why many folks leave the setting as it is - they want it fast, who doesn't?

But this faster option is really targetted at power-users who really know waht they are doing with Audacity.

As Koz alludes to many newbie (and some not-so-newbie) Audacity users get burnt by moving or deleting the referenced sound clip .

WC

[taueva]

So does this mean that if I make the change in Prefs to copy that I won't have the crash problem described by Koz?

[kozikowski]

The crash problem can be caused by anything, any instability. Remember Audacity runs on multiple platforms and they're all constantly evolving. The code can't be unconditionally stable everywhere all the time. So given that sooner or later Audacity is going to go face-first into the mud, it's good to have that last WAV file to go back to. There should be no reason to ever need to go back and capture the work again. The capture master WAV files take care of that.

The people who get killed are the ones who capture a once-in-a-lifetime live performance, Save the Project, edit it, and try to export to MP3. No Exports anywhere in the pipeline. When that Audacity fails, the whole show dies. "But I saved my AUP sound file regularly," they complain, completely misunderstanding how Audacity works.

Koz