Audacity Forum

Using Audacity 10.2.6 on a Mac 0SX10.6,4 I have problems saving and exporting any complete project files. After assembling a 45 minute group of items into one project, I cannot save the entire file without blank parts showing up. If I save as an au file. I see a flat-dashed line in the work window, when re-opened, that has my selection when I play it. However, there are empty portions not coinciding with any complete music of the shorter parts, within the longer project. If I export as an aiff file, I first got one saved but it had had blank sections. If I rebuild any of the saved files they still save with blank sections in the aup file. Trying to export as an aiff file, again, causes the active file in the work window to go flat or disappear and a completely blank file appears or the export fails. It is always the same musical sections that go blank. All files used in this creation are definitely aiff files. Can you say what is going on? Thanks.

The first thing we warn people is Audacity 1.2 isn't supported on modern Macs.

Audacity Current Release -- Mac
http://audacityteam.org/download/beta_mac

You can safely install both 1.2 and 1.3 in your machine, just don't use both at once. Audacity 1.3 Projects will not open in 1.2.

This particular problem could be your music files. After you created your show with external audio files, did you do anything to them like delete, rename, or move? Once you save a Project the computer becomes cast in stone and you can't change anything or there will be holes in your show.

Our joke is the OCD people always get burned with this because they're constantly "cleaning up" and "organizing" files. That's deadly to a project.

You can cause Audacity to copy music into itself for editing and not get this problem.

Audacity > Preferences > Import/Export > Copy Sound Files ... Safer.

Note which sound files are missing and see if they're still where you put them when you created the show. The exact folder and filename.

Koz

Not well documented is the prohibition against using filenames containing blanks. As a newbie, I recently ran amok on this. All the files I had saved with a rather basic name, like "001.aup" opened beautifully. When I saved a file as "March 21 file.aup" I was unable to open it. I did move the files off my desktop to a folder on the desktop, though. But I kept the data file folder together with the .aup file on each segment.

If anyone knows recovery methods for this kind of problem, as in how to recover files that were named with blanks, please speak up.

Newbieuser wrote:Not well documented is the prohibition against using filenames containing blanks.

Audacity should be able to handle file names that include spaces. Audacity 1.3.12 certainly can. You should however take care with non alpha-numeric characters as they may not be valid for file names on your system. Audacity 1.2.x does not support Unicode characters.