Audacity Forum

So I found a work-around: I opened one of the files on my external drives with Audacity. The "open with" drop down menu gave me two versions of the program (indistinguishable from each other in that menu.) I chose one, Audacity opened, but gave me an error message that it couldn't find the folder/file. I chose the other, and voila, I was in business, and was able to edit and save it to either of the external drives. I'll have to learn how to find the two versions and eliminate the balky one. Sounds like a Linux problem.

Thanks for your help.

iraj: I see you posted a work-around solution but I found the following settings in Ubuntu Focal (20.04 LTS) and thought they may help you or someone like me searching for a similar answer.

1. Open Settings:
GUI Desktop: Top right corner drop down menu

2. Open Applications:
GUI: Left pane menu

3. Locate/Select Audacity
GUI: Left pane menu

4. Locate section: Permissions & Access
GUI: Main settings panel

5. Locate/Enable: Read/write files on removable storage devices
nt: For my fresh Audacity installation this was "off/disabled" by default.
If that is your state enable this setting.
Close the settings panel

6. Open Audacity, Select File, Open

7. Select: "File System"

8. Double-Click: "Media"
This is where I found my external device within a directory named for my Ubuntu login user
ex: file system/media/manningda/MyPassport

Hope that helps.

Thanks. I'll see if it works as the default Audacity program is still the one that doesn't point to the external drives.

Ira