Audacity Forum

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!

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

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

I've re-read your first post:

silenteditor wrote: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.

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.

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?

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.

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

How much available space in "~/"?

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

$HOME is on the same root partition.

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