Error saving message

[kozikowski]

Upper and lower case letters, numbers, underscore and dash. Those are the safe characters to use in a filename -- all three computer platforms. I suppose I need to add the restriction "English."

I push files to company branches all over the world and don't use spaces, either. Quick, what's the UNIX protection character for a Space in manual FTP?

........um.

I don't remember, either.

Koz

[VHF]

How can anyone blame the Mac OS for what happened, when I can turn around and save the file on my Mac with the same name (minus the .aup) as an AIFF? As I've said all along, this is an Audacity issue, and the error message is worse than nothing.

For the record, I can read the Asian characters fine. Let's put the focus where it belongs: the Audacity code needs fixing, as it is rejecting names that are perfectly acceptable to the system. If that can't happen before the release of 2.0, they can at least fix the text of that antediluvian error message, and thus hopefully help newbies save their work!

[steve]

No-one is blaming Mac. I think we all agree that the error message is rubbish, so as you say, let's put the focus where it belongs and identify the problem. It's not just "oh Audacity is rubbish and messes up my files", there is a specific failure here which seems to change its spots depending on what sort of machine it's on, so we're in the lucky position here of having people on different platforms all looking at the problem.

Thanks Bill, I've now got something to report:

Try saving a project with the name:
Hesaid Help.aup

Bingo.

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Could not save project. Perhaps /home/
<user>/Desktop/Hesaid Help 
is not writable or the disk is full.

That's not the same as using a path delimiter.
Trying to save as "He/said Help.aup" (forward slash path delimiter) gives:

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The folder contents could not be displayed
Error stating file '/home/<user>/Desktop/
He': No such file or directory

It looks to me like Audacity may be trying to substitute forward and back slashes where Linux is only using forward slashes.

I can Export a file as "Hesaid Help.WAV"

If I Save the project as "Hesaid Help.aup"
and then change the name of the data folder to: "Hesaid Help_data"
and change all references to the data folder in the AUP file to "Hesaid Help.aup"
then the project still opens correctly.

However
if I change the name of the AUP file to "Hesaid Help.aup" I get the error:

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Couldn't find the project data folder: "Hesaid Help_data"

followed by the error message:

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Could not load file: "/home/<user>/Desktop/Hesaid Help.aup"

These characters are all OK for the project file name:

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`¬!"£$%^&*()-_=+]}[{'@;:?.>,<|

The only problem that I see is with forward slash and back slash.

For Exporting, all keyboard characters except for the forward slash are OK.

Export Multiple is OK with all except * (asterisk) ? (question mark) and / (forward slash).
The first two being used as wild cards?

[billw58]

@everyone: VHF doesn't care if his projects are portable to Unix or Windows, or are uploadable to an FTP server. He just wants it to work on Mac like every other program.

@VHF: what character in the file name caused the problem? That would really be useful to know. The only character I've found that causes a Save Project is fail is "". A project with a "/" in the file name successfully saves the auto-save information and successfully recovers the project after a Force Quit.

That said, here's what is possibly a real bug
- on Mac, start Audacity, generate tone, File > Save Project As
- try to name the project "testfile"
- error message: "Could not save project. Perhaps :Volumes:Hard Disk:Audacity tests:testfile is not writable or the disk is full."
- the "Save Project" menu item is now enabled
- do File > Save Project
- error message: "Couldn't write to file "": Error opening file"
- do File > Save Project As and you can successfully save the project.

-- Bill

[VHF]

No time for any experimenting now. Don't have exact recollection of the failed saves. The only verboten characters I might ever use would be backward slash: and text between a set of parentheses: (xxx). My apartment is getting new electrical wiring tomorrow, so I will be out of touch for a while. I'm sure by the time I get back you will all have everything figured out!

Thanks.

[billw58]

I'm sure by the time I get back you will all have everything figured out!

Thanks for the vote of confidence!

[VHF]

Back in the days of yore I used to use forward slashes in my file names on early Macs all the time. The current systems will still open and read files with that character in their names, but prevent you from saving anew with them in place, proffering suggested alternatives. So I got in the habit of replacing / by .

Did the code writers for Audacity get these mixed up? Is the back slash verboten on other systems? Frankly, I wouldn't care if they proscribe *any* characters, even a "w," as long as they explicitly state somewhere that files won't be saved if you use them. (One somewhere would be the very error message that gave rise to this topic.) If Japanese is o.k., then I assume that even the alt characters (option or Sh-option lines on Macs) would be good to go.

Sigh.

[billw58]

I believe that the backslash is verboten on Windows - there it is used as the path delimiter. This could be Audacity code, or it could be in wxWidgets - the cross-platform library that Audacity uses for a lot of UI elements (possibly including the Save dialog).

I'll post a link to this thread on the developers mailing list.

-- Bill

[VHF]

Oh, there was another (final?) point I wanted to make. If, when all the experimentation is concluded, it turns out that the backslash is the only proscribed character for regular saving in Audacity on a Mac (other than the ones the system itself wouldn't allow), that would contradict the message I read in the MacOS subforum (to which I allude in my very first topic post here). The person there listed a whole slew of forbidden fruits. Stevethefiddle fills us in about legacy Audacity, in which era this list really did obtain. So maybe what happened is that when they were updating the code to make it more flexible and forgiving, they simply *forgot* to include the backslash and whatever other recondite characters we might ferret out.

Unless someone can figure out why (cross-platform viability? whatever?) they would deliberately choose to forbid any perfectly good (to my system anyway) characters.

Again, thanks to everyone for your input.

[P.S. Later. Bill seems to have addressed the inquiry in my second paragraph above before I actually hit Post Message for this! Thanks, Bill.]

[Gale Andrews]

VHF's issue was unknown to me before, but we've been over the rest of this many times I think. Can the "elves" bookmark this thread? Just to clarify, "" is perfectly legal on Mac and Linux, and should not be rejected on those OS'es. On Windows, it "should" be rejected, but gives exactly the same "disk full" suggestion. By contrast, saving a project on Windows with "/" (illegal) is actually rejected with a specific error message, but not the same one as you get with export multiple. So it's entirely an Audacity problem.

Someone will correct me, but the only uncompressed multi-channel sound format is Broadcast WAV which very few people support.

Audacity Beta exports multi-channel WAV, AIFF, OGG and FLAC if you select "Use Custom Mix" on the Import/Export Preferences.

Further to that, filtering/replacement of all illegal characters whenever anything is saved (a project or an exported file) would be nice. That way you could send your project to someone working on a different OS and it would work.

I agree with Steve, that is far too restrictive for Mac/Linux users who will be prevented from using the (many more) Windows system-illegal characters. Thanks too Steve for reiterating that 1.3 is Unicode. It should work with any system-legal Unicode characters, and if it doesn't that's a bug. It may well be good practice to tell users to confine themselves to numbers, unaccented letters, underscore and dash in file names if they want to do anything other than keep the file to themselves. But that isn't Audacity's problem.

on Mac, start Audacity, generate tone, File > Save Project As
- try to name the project "testfile"
- error message: "Could not save project. Perhaps :Volumes:Hard Disk:Audacity tests:testfile is not writable or the disk is full."
- the "Save Project" menu item is now enabled
- do File > Save Project
- error message: "Couldn't write to file "": Error opening file"
- do File > Save Project As and you can successfully save the project.

Yes I found that testing on both Linux and Mac, and that's bad. To get rid of "Error opening file" on "Save Project", you have to exit or clear to a new project.

I've seen no issues with autosave, but correct me if I've missed something. Autosave only kicks in automatically if you force quit.
.

. Strangely, AFAIK, the export multiple function does not trap the "/" character as illegal, but it does trap "*" and "?".

Yes this is known about and is an issue on Linux, because the "/" character is the file separator and is illegal on the Linux ext3 file system (and most Unix file systems, I believe). If you enter that character and export multiple, you will get "cannot export audio to" error on Linux, when it should trigger the "not a legal filename" dialogue. On Mac, "/" is legal because it can be translated "behind the scenes" as I recall. Bill, can you remind me, does export multiple go ahead with "/" in a label, or does it give "cannot export"? On Windows, the "/" character properly triggers the export multiple "not a legal filename" dialogue.

What's really wanted to my mind is for system-illegal characters (customised per the three platforms) to go to essentially the same dialogue, similar to the existing export multiple illegal filename dialogue. Anyway, I can raise bugs for the two specifics.



Gale