Storage problem v 1.3.13-beta

[Fleischmann]

I installed audacity v 1.3.13-beta on 20110412.
Can't open a previously succsessfully stored aup-project. The following window appears:
Header: Fehler beim Öffnen des Projekts
Message: Fehler: not well-formed (invalid token) in Zeile 9

Fleischmann

[steve]

I doubt that the problem has been caused by Audacity 1.3.13. It's more likely that there's just an invalid character in the .AUP file.
Could you upload a copy of the .AUP file to the forum? (if the forum will not accept the ".aup" extension, just change the extension to ".txt")

[steve]

The first part of you AUP file:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no" ?>
<!DOCTYPE project PUBLIC "-//audacityproject-1.3.0//DTD//EN" "http://audacityteam.org/xml/audacityproject-1.3.0.dtd" >
<project xmlns="http://audacityteam.org/xml/" projname="00 Caldara Sinfonia 4-3 Cembalo_data" version="1.3.0" audacityversion="1.3.13-beta" sel0="4.4465737462" sel1="4.4465737462" vpos="0" h="0.0000000000" zoom="11.0197205301" rate="96000.0">
<tags>
<tag name="GENRE" value="Drei Violinen und Klavier"/>
<tag name="TITLE" value="Caldara Sinfonia 4-3 Cembalo V1 V2 und Cembalo"/>
<tag name="YEAR" value="2011"/>
<tag name="ARTIST" value="Dieter Fleischmann und MIDI"/>
<tag name="COMMENTS" value="20110413; H2 90°, Dieter Grünke und MIDI"/>
</tags>

Line 9:

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<tag name="COMMENTS" value="20110413; H2 90°, Dieter Grünke und MIDI"/>

The problem is with the non-alphanumeric characters (most probably the "degrees" symbol and possibly the umlaut, but best thing is to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from between the quote marks after "value=").

Open the AUP file in a plain text editor such as NotePad (make a backup copy of the file first) and change that line to:

Code: Select all

<tag name="COMMENTS" value="20110413 H2 90 deg Dieter Grunke und MIDI"/>

Save the file, then try opening it in Audacity.

To be safe, avoid using non-alphanumeric characters in metatags.

[Fleischmann]

Hello Steve,

Thanks a lot solving my problem. I made the proof solve/reopen the file with/without non alphanumeric characters in the tag. It reopens without non alphanumeric characters and not vice versa.
I just have to adapt hundreds of my existing files with this handycap yet when I will use v 1.3.13-beta.

I am sorry I mailed you personally but could not answer via open forum.

Dieter Fleischmann

[steve]

I just have to adapt hundreds of my existing files with this handycap yet when I will use v 1.3.13-beta.

Are you saying that you have Audacity Projects that do not open in Audacity 1.3.13, but do open in a previous version of Audacity?

Look in Audacity "Help menu > About Audacity".
What exactly does it say for the Audacity version? In particular, does is say "(Unicode)"?

[Fleischmann]

Dear Steve

First many thanks you spend so much time to my problems.

I want/will use in future: Audacity ® 1.3.13-beta (ANSI). After problems with Audacity ® 1.3.13-beta (ANSI)opening/reopening I installed Audacity ® 1.3.12-beta (Unicode) and the problems vanished - except: Audacity ® 1.3.12-beta (Unicode) does not reopen an aup-file having the "line 9" error and was previously stored with Audacity ® 1.3.13-beta (ANSI).
After reading your crucial help I successfully tested the possibility to use the newest Audacity ® 1.3.13-beta (ANSI), which I will do from now on and I will avoid using non-alphanumeric characters. I am forced to say: If a file has a "line 9" error and this very file went through Audacity ® 1.3.13-beta (ANSI) it is further on spoiled for (at least) Audacity ® 1.3.12-beta (Unicode).

Now I received your recent remark and I try to reply:
I use audacity software since years and I am very satisfied etditing self recorded music using ZOOM H2 recorder, producing wav-files 96kHz/24bit. I open these raw wav-files with audacity and save them as aup-files. Because ZOOM H2 gives the possibility to use 90° or 120° mic-stereo-technique I mark what I did during the recording session within the "Metadaten-Editor...". So very many ("hundreds") of my aup-files have an intrinsic non-alphanumeric character sleeper. So when using the most modern Audacity ® 1.3.13-beta (ANSI) software I have the chance either to repair all my aup-files in question or to repair a faulty file when just in use - because you greatfully led me the way!

By the way: I am hobby violonist and own and use several instruments and bows. Some of the luthiers and bow makers have German names containing ä, ö, ü, or ß. For example bowmaker "Grünke". Also the names of several composers spell with these characters and their names might be quoted in the "Metadaten-Editor...". But a recognized problem is not a problem any longer.
Again many thanks, Dieter Fleischmann

[steve]

The problem is compatibility between Unicode and ANSI.
Unfortunately the issue is confused by the fact that there is more than one "ANSI character set".

I was not aware that there were any characters in ANSI encoding that were not also defined in Unicode, though your experience has shown me that there are, and "ü" is one of them. You can use an umlaut in either ANSI or Unicode, but the encoding is different.

The ANSI build of Audacity is primarily designed for users of old Windows versions (such as Win 95 and 98) that do not (fully) support Unicode.
Unicode supports a much greater range of characters, and is generally recommended for users with modern operating systems. The important thing is that you cannot mix and match. If an Audacity Project has metadata that contains Unicode characters, then it will not open in the ANSI build of Audacity. What I didn't realise is that it also applies the other way round.

If you stick with either Unicode or ANSI, then you will probably be OK, but if you're on a modern operating system and using the ANSI build you will need to be particularly careful about non standard characters.

Fortunately there is a workaround.
If you find that you have an Audacity project that will not open and gives that error message "not well-formed (invalid token) in Line X", then it's possible to convert that AUP file to the correct coding so that it will open. What you need is a plain text editor that allow you to choose the character encoding when you save the file. I use GEdit on Linux, but NotePad++ on Windows can probably do this. What you would need to do is to open the AUP file in the text editor, then save the file (without making any changes to the file), but select the appropriate character encoding for the version of Audacity that you are using. In my case, I use the Unicode build of Audacity, so I would select "UTF-8" as the character encoding. For compatibility with the ANSI build I think you would need to select "Western (ISO 8859-15)".

[Fleischmann]

I tell you what I tried.
I opened the aup-file as txt-file in MS Notepad. I marked the characters "°" and "ü" in the text. Notepad offers 4 different codes for saving: Unicode, ANSI, UTF-8 and Big-Endian-Unicode. I tried all 4 of them. No code could change the marked characters in the text to "deg" and "ue" or any else. Therefore non of the four results was succesful - after changing the extension from "txt" to "aup" - for use in audacity 1.3.13-beta (ANSI).
Now I know the root of my problem and certenly I can live with, but is there a UNICODE-build of audacity 1.3.13-beta (ANSI) and MSWindows XP which I use?
Thanks a lot, Dieter Fleischmann

[Gale Andrews]

The following is as I understand it. It's quite complicated.

If you want to save Projects with accented or foreign characters, they must be both created and re-opened in a Unicode build of Audacity. That has always been true with the proviso that in Audacity 1.2.6 on Windows you could save extended ANSI characters like é in the .aup file. As far as I can see if you have a project saved in 1.3.13 ANSI that has an é in the track name, 1.3.13 Unicode should still open it correctly. But from Audacity 1.3 onwards, even those characters are far better stored in projects created by Audacity Unicode because that gives you extra flexibility. Windows 2000 upwards supports Unicode, so a Unicode build of Audacity is what you want.

Did you obtain Audacity from http://audacityteam.org/download/beta_windows ? There should be no reason for someone on XP to download a version marked for Windows 98/ME.

I do see an issue with builds obtained from sites other than ourselves, in that the file name of the Win 98/ME version is "audacity-win-1.3.13.exe". Perhaps we need to add -ansi to that to make the distinction clearer?

Non-Latin characters are stored as UTF-8 in an .aup file saved by a Unicode version of Audacity. é should appear as é in the .aup file if you read it in an editor that can read UTF-8. Non-Latin characters are stored as ANSI in an .aup file saved by an ANSI version of Audacity Beta. The é will appear as "é" in the .aup file. Unicode builds of Audacity will be looking for UTF-8 encoding for anything other than extended ANSI so won't understand an .aup file produced by an ANSI build of Audacity if it contains exotic characters like symbols.

I think you can probably use Notepad++ to edit an .aup file produced by an ANSI build of Audacity so that it uses UTF-8 and then Audacity (Unicode) will understand it. Please attach an example .aup file here that was created in ANSI Audacity but won't open in Unicode Audacity.



Gale

[Fleischmann]

Hello Gale,

Concerning computing matter I am innocent as a suckling. But I try to tell what I did.
I opened "audacity 1.3.13 (ANSI)".
In "audacity 1.3.13 (ANSI)" I opened an existing wav-file. This file containes the characters "°" and "ü" within the "Metadaten Editor...".
I saved this file as "Test 4 ANSI created.aup".
I closed "audacity 1.3.13 (ANSI)" and opened "audacity 1.3.12 (UNICODE)".
In "audacity 1.3.12 (UNICODE)" I tried to open file "Test 4 ANSI created.aup" but failed: error "Not well formed (invalid token) in Zeile 9".
I try to attach "Test 4 ANSI created.aup" to this message.

Next issue:
A few minutes ago I downloaded "Notepad++v5.9 (Unicode)". I opened an aup-file which containes the characters "°" and "ü" within the "Metadaten Editor..." (which I could not open in "audacity 1.3.13 (ANSI)": error "Not well formed (invalid token) in Zeile 9"), activated "Kodierung - ANSI" and saved it as it is. Subsequently I could open this file in "audacity 1.3.13 (ANSI)", showing "°" (instead of "°") and "ü" (instead of "ü") within the incriminated line 9 (Metadaten Editor...).

Please tell me if I could send further data.

Dieter