Audacity Forum

vanillaspice wrote:Clicking on Choose and navigating to the folder doesn't work, only typing the location.

I tested that on my Mac mini - Choose... , navigating and selecting a folder you can write to seems to work fine.

Gale

•You're going to need to enter the Go menu, hold Option, and select Library.
•Then you're going to navigate to Application Support>audacity>audacity.cfg.
•Open audacity.cfg with TextEdit and find TempDir=.
•It should have the temporary directory you specified there. Cut that text.
•Start Audacity.
•Return to Audacity>Preferences>Directories and paste the desired directory text.
•If you see Free Space: xyz GB, then it works, and you can click OK.
•If it continues to say that Free Space is not available because the specified location does not exist, manually type in the desired location.

Found and opened audacity.cfg. Found TempDir= (I had never specified it), copied and pasted the text into the Go to Folder dialog, and it went there. The specified TempDir folder exists, but is in a hidden folder named "Private"
I started Audacity, but it died as before, without giving me an option to enter a location.
The value of TempDir=/var/folders/zy/zycQj8ldHoOiM5dUnAnaWk+++TQ/-Tmp-/audacity-edwardnutter
I found that I had only Read access to that folder, (as Admin I had Read/Write access, but...) I backed out to folder zy and gave my user r/w access and propagated that down. Audacity still croaks.
I prepended /private to the TempDir= specification. Audacity still dies on launch.

I'd like to delete, then reinstall it fresh. I can delete its folder in Application Aupport and the zy folder in /var/folders. Besides the app itself, is there anything else I should trash before reinstalling?

RightWingNutter wrote:I'd like to delete, then reinstall it fresh. I can delete its folder in Application Aupport and the zy folder in /var/folders. Besides the app itself, is there anything else I should trash before reinstalling?

I somewhat doubt going back to a vanilla installation is going to help.

Is your aim to use Audacity without admin permissions or something else?

If you delete the folder

~/Library/Application Support/audacity/

and the file

~/Library/Preferences/audacity Preferences (which will exist if you ever used an old 1.2 version of Audacity)

then Audacity will have factory fresh settings if you do a reinstallation from the DMG.

Note the correct installation instructions:

1 Double-click the downloaded DMG to mount it

2 Then to install Audacity, copy the "Audacity" folder from the newly mounted DMG to /Applications or any other location of your choosing.

3 Launch Audacity from the /Applications folder, not from the DMG.

However this will then mean that Audacity will again try to write a temp directory in /var/folders.

If you have limited permissions I think it may be better instead to make sure Audacity is quit, then open audacity.cfg and edit TempDir to a path to which you have been given permission to write. For example: Make sure you have the [Directories] line as well as TempDir underneath that. Make sure that is the only TempDir specified in audacity.cfg.



Gale

I like to disrupt the system to the minimum degree necessary to get done what I need. I normally run as a user with Admin privileges, but can run as Admin and root if I need to. All I want is to be able to use Audacity normally, as I was able to until a couple of weeks ago.

I edited the TempDir= line to point at /TempFiles/Audacity and created that path off the top level of the disk (not off /users/me). Audacity seems to be happy with that. I'm still curious as to why it suddenly decided to not like its former temporary folder. Permission fixing with Disk Utility didn't help. I am irked that it crashed without ever giving me the chance to specify a temp folder from within the program. I consider that to be a bug.

We cannot see your machine to answer your question but the fact that you could not write to the original location is probably a Mac bug. Glad you got it fixed.

Yes it's a bug that Audacity crashes rather than letting you change Preferences in the app, but (perversely) it usually only affects Linux users launching Audacity as root (that is, almost no-one).


Gale