REINSTALL PROBLEMS

By mistake I deleted the current Audacity execution file. I thought, no problem, I will just reinstall and everything will be okay.
Reinstall went fine. It keep recent files, etc.

However, when I clicked to open a recent file it spent about five minutes copy the old file contents to a new aup file. I picked another file from the list of files in the music subdirectory with the same result. I have about 100 aup files and am constantly reopening and remixing tracks. Having to go through this every time is a pain.

The last time I upgraded to 3.0.3 I had the same problem, but it seemed to clear itself after a few uses.

Is this an recurring issue or a problem with my PC?

Thanks.

Are you opening “.aup” files, or “.aup3” files?

.aup is the extension for audacities older than 3.0.0, from 3.0.0 and so on the file extension is .aup3.

So in other words, the question is, Did you reinstall the same version that the one which executable you deleted?

Thank you Ivalogic.

Prior to upgrading to 3.0.3 all of my files ended in .aup. After the upgrade, when I opened a .aup file it converted it (without asking) to .aup3 and as described, in some cases took as long as five minutes to do so.

So now I have .aup and .aup3 versions of the same files. Another concern is that the conversion of .aup to .aup3 drastically increases the size of the file. I just now checked the size of a recent one. The original .aup file is 167 KB. The converted .aup3 file is 865,576 KB. I found one that is over 1 million KB.

So this process is creating duplicate files in my already overloaded system and the duplicate files are as much as 5,000 times larger than the original files.

As stated in my original post I have several hundred .aup files for song files. I regularly review, re-record tracks, replace instruments, and remix as I learn new techniques.

I’m going to copy an .aup track and rename it to .aup3 to see if it will open without going through the conversion process.

Something as significant as changing the file extension should have been warned about (and maybe it was but I missed it). My experience is that every time I update Audacity I wind up with a bunch of problems that I did not have before, like this one. I think the lesson is never to update.

Thanks again for your help.

It was warned about in all the Release Notes and the “What’s New” page in the Manual for all the 3.x versions so far. They all link yo this page in the Manual:
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/updating_from_audacity_2.x_to_audacity_3.html





Yes, it’s supposed to do that. 3.x now has a Unitary Project file, the AUP3, file a single database file that contains the entire project - in contrast 2.x
has a small .aup file and a large data folder alongside it which contains lots of little 6 second snippets of audio.

When you open (technically import) a 2.x .aup file in 3.x Audacity converts it to .aip3 format - and it can onlt then be saved in AUP3 format - and note that AUP3 format cannot be opened in 2.x

Audacity does NOT delete your AUP file as part of this process, just in case you may want to open it again in 2.x


As I explained above the AUP£ file contains all the data - you need to compare AUP3 size to the size of AUP plus it’s associated data folder - they should be fairly comparable in size.


You can delete the AUP files once they have been converted to AUP - or back them up to an external disk or USB clip.


It won’t …

WC