Audacity Forum

Hi there - I have done a quick search amd I am surprised that I cannot already find details on this issue, yet apologies if I have missed something.

I am having problems with 1.3.x project files not being compatible with the 1.2.x series. When opening the project a message appears saying that the project was created using 1.1.13 and cannot be opened in this version (1.2.6 in this case). This has come about by having the newer version on a home computer and the older version on a work computer - the work computer will be difficult to update.

There is no option in 1.1.13 to save the project in a format compatible with older versions so I am completely unable to use the project in my work place. This is making life a little difficult as I will need to finish the project in the work place.

Can anyone confirm that this is the case? Can anything be done about it? (you may suggest installing 1.2.x series at home instead - but doing that will mean having to start the project all over again - not what I want).

Thanks

Audacity 1.3 has many additional abilities beyond what Audacity 1.2 could do. Some of these require additional information to be stored in AUP file. Consequently Audacity 1.2 does not understand Audacity 1.3 projects.

There's a couple of possible solutions.

1) You can Export each track in the project as individual WAV files (assuming that you have multiple tracks - if only one track, then you can export that one track). The WAV file(s) can then be imported into a new project Audacity 1.2 project.

There's several reasons why method 1 can be a bit tricky and is not ideal, so going swiftly on to method 2 (which I would recommend):

2) Audacity 1.3.13 does not need to be installed. It can be run on a machine without installing it.
How to do this:

• Download the ZIP version of Audacity 1.3.13 that is appropriate for your work machine (for Windows it will be on this page: http://audacityteam.org/download/beta_windows )
• Extract the contents of the ZIP file into a folder on your home computer.
• Open up the folder and find the audacity.exe file.
• In the same folder as the audacity.exe file, create a new folder and name it Portable Settings
• Copy that entire folder onto a USB stick, or a CD, or anything else and take it to work
• Copy that entire folder anywhere on the local drive of the work machine (avoid copying it to a network drive).
• Open the folder on the local drive of the work machine and double click on the audacity.exe file to launch the program.

Running Audacity this way avoids Audacity having to write anything as a system file. The only data that is written is user data that will be written in your user space on the computer, and Audacity's settings will be written to the "Portable Settings" folder.

If you took the folder to work on a USB stick you can even run Audacity directly from the USB stick.
(always virus scan USB sticks before and after taking them to work).