Audacity Forum

I have found a new problem with Audacity 1.3.7. It will not reconstitute something it has saved,whether it was saved yesterday or 2 minutes ago. There are two warning/error messages that pop up. The first asks about removing orphaned files,which seems to tie in with editing done on a project and seems to be benign,having no ill effect on the saved .au file. This sometimes comes up first but other times does not pop up at all. The second warning,however, concerning missing audio data blockfields, asks about replacing this audio with silence, which if you click yes,removes all the audio. Through trial and error, I know not to say yes to the latter but if I just close the project,then I can't work on it further. What is going on here? Why is this happening and what is the correct way to handle this problem so that I can continue to work on the files without losing all my previous work. ( I am not posting this on the Mac forum because I don't think it is a Mac-related issue but in case the info is relevant,I'm running a new Intel duo core on Leopard 10.5.7.

As always,thanks in advance for any suggestions,help or advice.

Are you filling up your hard drive? Not likely on a machine that new, but still. What's the capacity of the System Drive and how much is left? Any external drives mounted?

Have you performed a Disk Verify?

Go > Utilities > Disk Utility > System Drive > Verify Drive

You understand you can't move, delete, change, modify or in any way "manage" files outside of Audacity once you Save a Project, right? An Audacity Project is an Editorial Production Environment Manager, it's not a WAV cutter. It remembers where all the files in your show are and they need to not move at all between editing sessions. The AUP file is just the manager, it's not a sound file.

What's the show? Live capture of you singing into a microphone?

<<<in case the info is relevant,I'm running a new Intel duo core on Leopard 10.5.7. >>>

It's always relevant and we'd be asking you that had you not told us.

<<<I am not posting this on the Mac forum because I don't think it is a Mac-related issue>>>

It's never good to pre-diagnose problems until after you solve them.

Koz

Thanks, Koz, for your reply. The hard drive is rather large, 640GB and not anywhere close to being full. I only use an external drive to back up my files so it is never on and I haven't been managing any of the files, that I' m aware of, outside of Audacity. In other words, I am simply recording a vocal or guitar track and editing it , then saving it as an .au file for more work in the future. This last time I opened the just saved .au file, literally 1 minute after closing, to see if I got the "replace blockfields with silence" message, I did. Previously, I had only see this warning when I had recorded something in 1.2.6 and then re-opened it in 1.3.7 and then not every time. I am moving things around and/or erasing parts of the track but prior to saving my work.

I usually don't export a track until I'm finished with it but maybe it is better to do that then to save it as an .au file. I'm not sure that I've ever done a Disk Verify Can you tell me what that does?

Thanks

Let's change things around a little.

Forget the au files. you're not supposed to even know about those. Those are part of a managed project and almost never contain more than a couple of seconds of sound. They're not even formal sound files.

Once you get a sound performance on the time line that makes you happy, Export As WAV and call it a name with good naming convention. Upper and lower case letters, numbers, underscore, and dash. No other characters.

That file is a good, stable, stand-alone sound file and you can copy it and move it around as you see fit. Audacity, from the first post, does not Save sound files. To get a real sound file, you have to Export one.

Koz

Thanks for your reply, Koz.
I usually export in AIFF or MP3 and have never chosen to export files in the WAV format because I thought it was only recognizable by IBM type PCs. I assume from your response that this is not the case and will give it a try.

WAV files are acceptable to all three computing platforms. That's why it's the default uncompressed format in Audacity.

Koz