Freezes during export

[CJRhoades]

So I just finished a little project I've been working. It contains fragments of 11 different other files that I imported and is a little over 13 minutes in length. Whenever I try to export to WAV, the second I hit the save button, Audacity becomes completely unresponsive. Anywhere I click on the window gives me the windows error "ding!". Then I have to end the task to make it close. I can save it just fine as a project file but it wont let me export it.

How do I fix this?

[kozikowski]

Did you put a date in your filename? Operating systems hate that. Try the filename again with only legal characters: Upper and lower case letters, numbers, underscore and dash. Today's date is 20110130, not 1/30/11.

Koz

[CJRhoades]

I named the file "test". No date in it, just 4 lower case letters.

[CJRhoades]

Bump. I tried reinstalling but it didn't help either.

[kozikowski]

project file

Probably not. Audacity Projects, particularly if you used external sound files consist of multiple different files. That's why they're so hard to move. It's dangerous to say "The Project File." That AUP thing is just the beginning of what could be thousands.

I tried reinstalling

But possibly didn't succeed. If you have an unstable Audacity, you may have to delete the configuration file, or edit it.

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Audacity_Preferences

Koz

[CJRhoades]

Oh wow I never thought to delete the config file. That worked perfectly! Thanks.

[penna]

I'm using Audacity 1.3 Beta on Windows7 (hate it almost as much as Vista) and tonight I encountered this problem for the 2nd time while trying to perform export to multple on an aup file of an album separated into several regions. Both times it would always freeze at the same point in the same region, and the freeze would be so bad that it would take about about two minutes just for the ctrl+alt+del option box to open and let me select Task Manager; then after another two minutes Task Manager still wouldn't open so I'd wind up forcing a power off. After restarting, I tried removing all punctuation from the label (didn't help), deleting the config file (didn't help), and finally cutting the region that caused the problem so I could paste it into a new aup file. The first time I had this problem, I was able to do that, and successfully export from the new aup file to a wav, however after burning to cd, the file was completely silent. Tonight when I attempted to cut the region, it just caused another freeze. Suspecting Win7 to be the problem, I tried copying the aup file and data folder to a usb thumbdrive, intending to open it on my XP machine to try exporting all the regions, however at a certain point the copying hung. After several minutes it reported that there was a problem with a single au file, however after choosing to cancel the copy operation, it once again froze (dang, Win7 doesn't like problem au files!). Luckily, I had written down the name of the problem file, so after restarting, I moved it out of the data folder to the desktop (it was able to do that for some reason!); then I reopened the aup file, and got a message that one block audio file was missing, with options of what to do; I chose to fill with silence for that session only. Once opened, I could see it was a short block of time on one channel during the region that always caused the freeze during export, that was now silent. I then exported to multiple and it did the whole album no problem. So I lost a few seconds in one channel of one song... but the steps I had to take to find the problem was a LOT of trouble. It would be great if Audacity could let you know about a problem au file DURING exporting, rather than freezing... but if this should happen again, I'll again try copying to a usb drive to locate it. Also, I wonder if there's a way to repair problem files?