Audacity Forum

I've been going nuts on my Mac G4 encountering the "error opening file" message randomly upon trying to re-open project files. Seemed like the apparent corruption took place whenever I tried to transfer project files between home and office computers or even moving project files to a common folder to consolidate them.

What I've discovered is that Audacity files that won't open inside a folder where they've been moved WILL open once they are moved back to the desktop.

Wish I'd discovered this before deleting several projects that I had thought were irreparably damaged!

I couldn't find anything in the Audacity manual about this. Woulda been nice to know . . .

All the best–

michalthompson

I realize I'm replying to an ancient post, but it's the first thing I Googled with a similar problem.

It appears Audacity on Mac has a number of issues with where and how things are saved. Longer names on your aup files on FAT32 drives can screw things up and give the "Error opening file" issue too.

Moving the aup file and corresponding data folder to a Mac OS Extended drive (or what have you) makes it all happy again, just as the OP mentions. The file might not be bogus. It might just be the drive.

Thankyou for posting this. What a simple fix I should have thought of it before now

Audacity projects are very brittle and don't like being moved.

A project consists of an .aup file and a _data folder.
The _data folder contains all of the project audio and graphic data in hunderds of small files, and the .aup file tells Audacity how to construct the project from those files.
The .aup file and the _data folder must live in the same place, i.e. in the same folder. If Audacity doesn't find the _data folder there, it gives up and goes home. If all the data files are not in the _data folder, exactly as the .aup file says they should be, you lose some or all of the project.

You can move Audacity projects but, as a general rule, you shouldn't, unless you really have to.

Unusual characters in filenames can also cause problems. You should restrict your filenames to use 0-9, a-z, underscore and dash.

See this page from the wiki on project files:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... ement_Tips


PO'L

If somebody has a gun and is forcing you to move a project, you can increase your chances of success over the suggestions already listed by changing the preferences so Audacity Projects copy music inside themselves instead of leaving imported clips where they started. Missing this one step up is cause for all those "missing short segments in my show" postings here on the forum.

"The blue waves are still on the screen, but the sound cuts out."

Then, you need so sit quietly and ask yourself if you really, really need Projects. Most people don't. I'll go so far as to suggest there's only a handful of people who need them compared to the whole sound world.

I've managed to go my whole life with many captures and processing jobs and production for theatrical shows and never Saved a Project yet. At the end of a production cycle, I have the original studio capture WAV files and the processed delivered Client Master WAV files. No _data folders or AUP files.

FAT32. I need to be crystal clear about that, too. You're saving work to a hard drive formatted an obsolete Windows format which is so old it happens to be recognized by everybody. No, I'm not shocked it won't do modern Mac tricks. If the drive belongs to you (and it's empty) Erase it to MacOS Extended using Go > Utilities > Disk Utilities. Then, suddenly, it's a Mac disk and all those problems will vanish.

Except the forbidden filename characters. You should still stick to upper and lower case letters, numbers, underscore, and dash.

Koz