Project cannot be opened

Hello all
During the working process Audacity crashed. Now it tries to open the crashed file as project, but all I get is “Error: not well formed at line 8”. By the way, I`ve never used project saving because of this error that I got every time I tried to open the project file.

I am using Audacity 1.3.5 with Windows 10

That’s an extremely old version.
The current version is 3.1.3, available here: Audacity ® | Downloads
If you want to retain full compatibility with old projects, there is Audacity 2.4.2 available here: Old Audacity versions download


Please attach the AUP file to your reply and I’ll look to see if it is repairable. (How to attach files: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-attach-files-to-forum-posts/24026/1)

How do I find the AUP file? I use some sort of portable version (1.3 Beta) someone downloaded several years ago. All I have is Audacity folder containing 3 more folders such as Languages, Nyquist and Plugins.

It’s the Audacity project file.
When you save a project with old versions of Audacity, it creates an “AUP” file and a “_data” folder. For example, if you save as “MyTest”, then Audacity creates a file called “MyTest.aup” and a folder called “MyTest_data”. (Both parts are essential and must not be manually edited unless you know what you’re doing).

Note that since Audacity 3.0.0, the project format has changed. In current versions of Audacity, a project is saved as a single “AUP3” file.

Yeah, but I did not save the project. The program saved it itself and I cant find where. The search for aup file and data folder revealed nothing :frowning:

When you launch Audacity, what exactly happens?

It says that the previous work was terminated due to crash. It suggests to open the automatically saved project. When I try so I see error : not well formed at line 8

Guess its simpler to start the work again using the newest software?

Sometimes “File” > “Save Project As” can divine the directory where projects are saved.

It’s trying to recover the previously open project from the auto-save file, but the auto-save file is damaged. Most likely the project cannot be recovered.


Probably yes.

Note that projects should be saved to the computer’s internal drive - external drives may corrupt Audacity projects.