Audacity Forum

I teach an Intro. to Audio Production class using Audacity and a number of my students have experienced the same problem.

They'll have their project finished with a few layers of audio and go to play it back only to find some layers wont play. Everything is visible on the screen like the audio is there but no sound.

Does anyone know what might be happening?

If you have your preferences set to "read uncompressed files from original" then move or delete the original file then you will have blue waves but no sound.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Audacity_Projects

-- Bill

Thanks Bill,

From now on I'll make sure that the students check the safer method that will make a copy of the uncompressed file. I'm not sure if they moved or deleted the sound files before but just to be safe....

Since you're teaching a course in this. You can open up the Audacity AUP file in a text editor and read it. It will tell you where your music files are expected to be. Then you can go looking and make sure those files exist.

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

See down about line 7 there is a location and file name. If "piano2.wav" gets moved from that exact hard drive location, the show will drop dead.

That picture was made from a very simple AUP file that I exploded and added blank lines so it's easier to see and understand. Yours may be more compact

Koz