Turning off "disallowed for some reason" when saving?

[sagetyrtle]

I save my Audacity project constantly as I work. So I find the new dialogue box that pops up when I try to save after NOT making any changes fairly obnoxious.

Is there a way to turn it off?

Thanks very much for any help/suggestions you might have.

[steve]

I don't get a "disallowed for some reason" message. Could you describe a step-by-step of how you get the message. Also, which version of Audacity are you using (look in "Help > About Audacity")

[sagetyrtle]

I'm using 1.3.5, Windows XP.

If I save, then listen to a bit more audio in the process of editing but don't change anything, then save (which I tend to do; I save extremely often) I get the "Disallowed for some reason. Try selecting some audio first?" dialogue box. Because I haven't changed anything, but I'm still attempting to save the project.

Is that the info you're looking for? Let me know if I've left anything out.

[steve]

Let me know if I've left anything out.

I suspect that you have missed out something like "When I press Ctrl+S"

[sagetyrtle]

Ah. Right. When I press control-S in order to save.

[steve]

That is (sort of) the explanation. If you try to select "Save" from the menu (when nothing has been changed) you will see that it is greyed out. The error message when you use the keyboard short-cut (though admittedly badly worded) is telling you that the option to save is unavailable (because there is nothing to save that is not already saved).

[sagetyrtle]

Hi Steve, thanks very much for your reply.

I do in fact understand why it's happening, I'm just wondering if there's some way to turn off the dialogue box, as it is a new addition in this version.

[steve]

I don't think there is any "user interface" option for turning it off, so without hacking the code, no I don't think that you can turn it off. Actually, I didn't realise that before 1.3.5 it didn't produce an error. It seems to me quite reasonable that an error message should be produced, and I doubt that there would be much enthusiasm among the developers for changing the behaviour.

Getting back to the issue of regularly saving projects - I presume that the reason that you want to save so frequently is for security against losing your work? If so, then you may be better to use "Save As" (but there is no keyboard short-cut). The advantage of "Save As" is that it creates a new copy each time. In the event of a severe crash, it is possible that the last saved project could be corrupted and unusable, but if you regularly use "Save as" then the previous back up version will still be intact. Of course the down side is that it will use a lot of disk space, so in your working practice you need to balance the advantages of backups against the cost of disk space.