Audacity Forum

When I try and save an FFT spectrum as a .txt file the software does not append the ".txt" to the file and I have to go in subsequently and modify the file name to add the suffix/file type. Am I doing something wrong or is this a system glitch?

I think that you have just run into one of the "oddities" of cross-platform programs.

Actually, the "oddity" is that Windows does not recognise file types unless they have a file extension. Other operating systems are able to recognise plain text files whether they have a ".txt" file extension or not (by looking at the contents of the file).

What should happen (and please say if this is not happening) is that when you select:
"Analyze menu > Plot Spectrum > Export"
The "Name:" field should be already filled in with "spectrum.txt"
If you then select a directory (folder) and click the "Save" button, a file called "spectrum.txt" should be created in the specified directory.

If you overwrite the "Name:" with your own text, then the file will be saved with exactly the name that you enter. ".txt" will not be automatically appended to the name. This is intentional so as to allow the files to be written with any file extension that the user chooses, or with no file extension at all.

Does this answer your question?

steve wrote:What should happen (and please say if this is not happening) is that when you select:
"Analyze menu > Plot Spectrum > Export"
The "Name:" field should be already filled in with "spectrum.txt"
If you then select a directory (folder) and click the "Save" button, a file called "spectrum.txt" should be created in the specified directory.

Thanks for the prompt response but I checked once again and the name field contains only the word "spectrum" to identify the file name. The .txt suffix is not present even though the file type box just below is selected to ".txt"

Thanks for getting back.
I'm not able to reproduce the problem, but I'm not on Windows so it may be different.

So that I can get this checked out and submit a bug report, could you:
1) look in "Help > About Audacity" and give me the full version number. (it'll be something like "Audacity ® 2.0.0-alpha-Feb 6 2012 (Unicode)")
2) say which version of Window you are using?

Thanks

@steve,

I confirm the reported behaviour on my Win 7 system.

I am using Audacity 1.3.14 Beta Unicode and running on Windows 7 SP2

Thanks for the report. This is known about already:
http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387 .

I have not tested, but I suspect Windows Vista and earlier (but not Windows 7) have the same issue with other text files such as labels.txt and tags.xml (saving a template in Metadata Editor).


Gale