Lion Finder .au Files

[jbraser]

Hello All:
I have Audacity 1.3.13 on OS 10.7 Lion. In "All My Files" in the Finder there are 3,000 .au files, even though I have only recorded three LPs. Does anyone know of a way around having all those files listed under "Music"? It makes the Finder very combersome.
John

[Gale Andrews]

I have Audacity 1.3.13 on OS 10.7 Lion. In "All My Files" in the Finder there are 3,000 .au files, even though I have only recorded three LPs. Does anyone know of a way around having all those files listed under "Music"? It makes the Finder very combersome.

I'm not on OS X but is the answer not to save your Audacity projects in a particular folder? Or is "Music " a "virtual" library (it doesn't exist, but Finder puts .au files there because it recognises the .au extension as "music")?

Otherwise do you need to save projects? If you don't want to work on the recorded audio again after exiting Audacity you could just export WAV or AIFF audio files (or AAC or MP3 if you prefer smaller file size with some quality loss) and not save projects. This is less safe if you want to spend some time editing the recording after making it, but exporting a backup WAV file before starting to edit would be safer still.

If you have exported finished audio files already and are completely happy with them, you can carefully delete the _data folder those .au files are in and also the .aup project file having the same name as the _data folder.

For the difference between saving projects and exporting see:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/File_Management_Tips



Gale

[jbraser]

Gale
I deleted the _data files, but kept the audacity project files. That seems to work just fine. I have burned the projects to CDs and they are also available in iTunes. Thank you for the help.

[Gale Andrews]

I deleted the _data files, but kept the audacity project files. That seems to work just fine. I have burned the projects to CDs and they are also available in iTunes.

The .aup project files are only a text file referencing the .au files in the _data folder for the project. So if you deleted the_data folders, the .aup project files are useless and you may as well delete those too.



Gale

[wasleys]

To develop Gale's point.

On my Mac I created a folder named Audacity. In that Audacity folder I create a folder for each project and save the project using the same name as its folder.

Most of my stuff is ex cassette and destined for CDs so when I convert an Audacity project to AIFF I add the duration to the filename (eg filename_25m39.aiff) as that makes it easier when trying to make best use of CD space.

[kozikowski]

This is the structure of Snow Leopard and it's fairly common.

Screen shot 2011-08-28 at 9.00.57 PM.png (46.68 KiB) Viewed 2168 times

That's where "Music" is in the grand scheme of things.

Note the "~" directory in the supervisory level. We assume that's why I needed my password.

I do not like needing my password to install an Audacity plugin or service.

Koz

[kozikowski]

"Illustrator" turns out to be a text file incorrectly placed. I wondered about that.
Koz

[Gale Andrews]

This is the structure of Snow Leopard and it's fairly common.

Is it common? FFmpeg installs by default to /usr/local/lib/audacity. That can certainly have permissions problems (and will eventually be changed) but it was your choice to put FFmpeg where you did, surely?

So are you keeping the audacity.cfg settings file in a "portable settings" folder inside the Audacity installation folder?

I do not like needing my password to install an Audacity plugin or service.

Do you need a password to install a Nyquist or VST plug-in in the plug-ins folder inside the Audacity installation folder?



Gale