"Could not save project. Perhaps $PATH is not writable..."

[silenteditor]

Having trouble with Audacity 2.2.1 (and 2.2.0 before it) on Debian.

I have over 200 GB available on the hard drive in question. Standard permissions on my home directory. I open an MP3 file to edit. Choose "Save Project" from the file menu, place the file somewhere in my home directory. I get the following error message in a window:

"Could not save project. Perhaps [the file path in /home/] is not writable or the disk is full."

I am able to continue editing and export the final product as a sound file of whatever format ... but I can't save the project (.aup file).

Any help appreciated. Thanks!

[steve]

Ensure that you are giving it a legal file name. In particular, don't use the "/" character.

[silenteditor]

Thanks, I did that already (just to be extra sure, I only used ASCII alphabet characters and no spaces.) Same problem persists.

[steve]

I've re-read your first post:

the file path in /home/] is not writable

That's correct. For a standard user account, the file path /home/ is not writable. Your "Home" folder is "/home/username/" where "username" is your log-in name.

[silenteditor]

Sorry for the ambiguity. I was not trying to save in /home/ itself, I was trying to save in a subdirectory of my home directory. I have the normal read and write permissions. Other programs that I run, e.g. a text editor, are able to create and write files in the directory in question.

[steve]

OK, so we will need to get down to the fine detail, because obviously "something" is wrong.

If you shut down and restart Audacity, then generate a 30 second tone (Generate menu), and then try to save the new project as "my-project" in "~/Desktop/", what happens?

[silenteditor]

I followed your steps exactly, and was able to save the .aup file in ~/Desktop without any error.

I did a little further troubleshooting:

First, I exited the program and re-opened my-project.aup, everything worked as expected.

Second, I exited he program again. Restarted the program with a blank/new project. Imported (from the file menu) the original audio file in question, a 107 megabyte MP3 file. I tried to save the resulting project (two tracks, just under two hours) in ~/Desktop as my-project-2 . Got the same error.

[steve]

I have over 200 GB available on the hard drive in question.

How much available space in "~/"?

[silenteditor]

$ df / reports
261999448 used, 222405624 available, 55% used.

$HOME is on the same root partition.

[steve]

Can you try with a different large file to see if the problem is specific to that MP3.