"file not well formed in line 6" error?

[steve]

It's not actually a space, it is a character, but not a valid one.

You need to also change the file that it is referring to so that it matches the information in the AUP file.
Hopefully you have not moved or deleted any of the files that the Audacity project refers to.

This article gives background information about how AUP files work: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... ement_Tips

[SteveCousins]

Managed to close and reopen to find the project in it's entirety.

Lesson to learn - space is regarded as a foreign character!

Thanks for your help Steve

S....

[steve]

Lesson to learn - space is regarded as a foreign character!

NO. It was not a "space" that was causing the problem, it was ASCII character 01

ASCII character 01 is SOH (Start of heading )
ASCII character 32 (&20 Hex) is a space

A space is a valid character, though generally best to be avoided in file names as it can lead to confusion such as this.

http://www.lammertbies.nl/comm/info/asc ... .html#stah

[zen_city]

So this is some coding error in the 1.34 programming. It has nothing to do with my recording levels or whether I move around the recording folder, or some other setting I changed? It's just random? Because sometimes I get the error and and sometimes not.

[steve]

No it's not "random" - it is due to using invalid characters - as already described in this thread.
Restrict yourself to using numbers, upper and lower case letters, hyphen and underscore for all file names.

Note that there is a known issue regarding the use of [, ], Z, J, K, L, P, R, Home, End keys in labels:
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... _Checklist

[zen_city]

Thanks to all. A file naming effort never occured to me since I am not a programmer, just a music user. Would be good to put these naming conventions in the version documentation when it comes out in stable version.

[steve]

It is documented in the Audacity wiki (link at top of every page in this forum).

[davigoli]

This is a code bug in Audacity. First of all, I encounter this frequently (currently using 1.3.7 but also earlier versions), and it appears that the metadata editor doesn't strip whitespace from input, so, for example, filling in the metadata form and pressing "return" (on Mac OS X) on each line results in that "return" (^M) character being included in that metadata field, which isn't even what I wanted in the first place. Fortunately, .aup files are just XML, so you can pull open the raw file and edit it in any text editor, but we shouldn't expect normal music users to have to ever do this. For most users, it just looks like their work is irretrievably lost.

Second of all, if there are forbidden characters, Audacity should have form validation in place to prevent them from being written to the project file in the first place. Audacity should never write anything to the project file that it can't subsequently parse back - if it does so, it's plainly a code bug. We shouldn't make it the responsibility of the users to look up obscure eccentric software issues, or else they might think they lost their work -- and just give up on Audacity.

I'm a developer myself and might work up a patch for this issue, if someone else isn't already looking into it.

[kozikowski]

There are only three people working on the Mac version, and only one of them is a developer. You'd make, what, [counting on fingers] four.

You missed the important oddities of Audacity. "Save" will not produce a sound file which I'm betting well over 90% of the users expect. That's responsible for much more lost work than a simple "/" mark in a filename.

Koz

[Leland]

This is a code bug in Audacity. First of all, I encounter this frequently (currently using 1.3.7 but also earlier versions), and it appears that the metadata editor doesn't strip whitespace from input, so, for example, filling in the metadata form and pressing "return" (on Mac OS X) on each line results in that "return" (^M) character being included in that metadata field, which isn't even what I wanted in the first place.

Can you provide steps on reproducing this? I've tried several things and can not get the control-m to be written in the .aup.

Leland