Audacity Forum

Please help ... i haven't used audacity for quite a while. I opened a previous recording and found that one recording is looking like two. It's the same, single track on the left but on the right the track has a duplicate track below and it comes of the same 'track panel' ... i know that it's a setting that has to be changed but i don't remember how/which. i have wasted much time clicking about everywhere trying to find but i have lost patience. i have much work to do and i don't want to spend most of Saturday evening messing about with settings.

Please, please, please somebody tell me if you know which setting will make the track look like a normal single track again.

Thank you so so much

The track is a stereo track. This is normal - one Track Control Panel but two "tracks" to the right of it.

Are you sure the original was a single, mono track?

-- Bill

you are recording a mono input (such as a microphone) you can set Audacity to record in mono (one single track rather than the double track) by going to:
"Edit menu > Preferences > Devices" and setting "Channels" to "1 (mono)".
For recording a stereo track (for example if recording from a turntable) then "Channels" should be set to "2 (stereo)" and it will produce the double (stereo) track.

Thanks for your help

I fumbled my way to finding out what was going on after I thought that no one would reply you must've posted just after I checked and lost hope

I have a new problem now:

Please reply quickly My old pc was an unbelievable hassle! So I bought a new one. It's cool! BUT!!!!! On the old pc which had the Windows XP operating system, I was recording text which I needed to learn and I was saving it in three formats:
1. the data folders that only Audacity uses and likes
2. the .aup project format that I could work on and make changes to
3. the .mp3 format which my mp3 player insists on

I was happy with my work ... all was going well ... then i gave my new pc the modern Windows 7 operating system

I don't know if that's what the problem is . . . i can use all of my files but cannot make changes. I get the message that the file is not writeable. It's even said that the .aup files are not recognised!!

Help, what can i do?

hi, i tried saving a project file under a different file name, then deleted the old project file and the data folder. It seems to have behaved normally. I am now trying to save the file again using the original filename. Do you think this will work? I don't understand why it would not save changes to the original file. Will I have to go through this name change hassle with all my other files before I can make changes to them?

OH NO!!

Can anyone please explain why this has happened?



Thanks so much

This forum is pretty active and most posts get a response within a couple of days, but there are no paid staff here and we are in various time zones so you may need to wait for your posts to bounce around the globe for a while.

Depending on your permissions, Windows 7 will only allow you to write files to certain locations. Your "My Documents" folder and all sub folders should be writeable.

Ensure that you use standard characters - letters, numbers, space, underscore and hyphen only. Avoid using non-standard characters such as slash "/", dot ".", comma ",", parentheses "(" and so on.

Pay particular attention if there are dates in the file name - "My File 12/05/2010" will fail. "My File 12-05-2010" is OK.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for that tip but this time I haven't got that stuff going on with the filenames. The filenames were fine before when I was using xp and I don't think it's a problem caused by Windows 7 either. I had recordings that I would add more to. I would: File/Open the project file and go to the end of the recording. Then I would click on Record and a new track would appear and this would record further new stuff. When I finished recording, I would click Stop and copy and paste the new patch onto the end of the original piece. I could even cut bits out. Whatever changes I made, I could still: File/Save Project and it would save the changes without even asking for filenames, it would use the name already it had but this time the messages said: file could not be saved ... it said something about file not being writeable ... or perhaps Read Only. The message caused me to go to the Properties of the file to see if it was Read Only but it wasn't. I have to File/Open the original recordings and File/Save As to give them a different name. Then, I can do all the stuff that I could do before. I don't understand this. I want the original filenames otherwise all my recordings will become confusing to me. So then I have to delete the files I used File/Save As on and File/Open the files that have the new names and do File/Save As to them again to give them the filename that I want them to have.

I hope you are still with me ... I know there must be a short straight forward way to decribe all the above but I didn't think . . . sorry. I don't understand why though. Why don't my original files JUST WORK as they did before?

I didn't think this forum had members globally!! I'm a patient person . . . I don't mind waiting but panic and rush are factors related to emergencies and I seem to have lots. Also ... messages on some forums don't ever get a reply !! I know this because I forgot and then MONTHS LATER went back and there had been no replies !! So I'm very glad that you can say that about replies

Thank you

Whic version of 1.3 are you using - the latest ia 1.3.12.

I used to get this problem occasionally with earlier versions of 1.3 but AFAIK this has been fixed for the later versions.

You can get 1.3.12 from here: http://audacityteam.org/download/

WC

Hi

Thank you so much. I have been using Audacity 1.3.7 Beta.

I'm going to try the 1.3.12 and see it solves my problem.

Thankx