Error: Could not read the contents - Permission denied

Hi!

I like Audacity very much and I have used it a lot on Ubuntu 18.04. Now I installed it on my new Ubuntu 20.04 partition. You can install 2 versions of Audacity directly from the ubuntu distribution release: 2.3.3 and 2.4.2. I installed 2.4.2 of course. But when I want to open a file I get this error:

“Could not read the contents of Skrivebord
Error opening directory ‘/mnt/4AF15A0435E762B4/DataDoc/OneDrive/Skrivebord’: Permission denied”

I can’t remember any other software that cannot read that folder…

Then, on https://www.audacityteam.org/download/linux/ I read this:

“Due to reported problems with SnapCraft / Flatpak / PPA versions, our current recommendation for Ubuntu / Mint users is to install the “deb” version from the main repository.”

But I don’t really know what ‘the “deb” version from the main repository’ means…

It’s the 2.3.3 version.

OK. I uninstalled the 2.4.2 version and installed the 2.3.3 version. That solved the problem! Thank you.
But why are there 2 versions, and what about ver. 3.0?

The “deb” version (Audacity 2.3.3) is the current Linux build from Debian. Ubuntu is based on Debian and uses many packages from Debian.
Debian builds frequently lag behind the latest releases but are generally well tested.

The 3.0 version is (probably) a Flatpak build. Flatpak is intended to create binaries (executable apps) that can run on any Linux PC. However, Flatpak seems to be difficult to get right for complex apps like Audacity that require access to multiple computer resources, and I’m not convinced that they’ve got it right yet (as evidenced by your initial post).

OK. Thank you for the explanation!