Failure to open database

Every so often, when opening a succession of files and closing some and re-opening some (sorry no definitive path to the error) I get a file failing topen with a message ‘Failed to open the project’s database’. On some later file opening I will then get a crash recovery option and if I choose to recover I just get an empty project - no tracks. I am opening the files by double-clicking on file names in Windows 10’s file explorer, having made Audacity the default application for .wav files. Sorry that I can’t reproduce this reliably, but might be something to watch out for.

Please do let us know if you find repeatable steps.
We are aware that a few users are experiencing problems like this, but it is proving difficult to locate the problem because it doesn’t happen for most of us.

This is logged as P1 Bug #2700
https://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2700

@jathalls: If you ever get reliable “steps to repeat” do please let us know.

Peter.

I’ve been seeing this quite a bit too, when using macros to batch process several podcasts.
I haven’t noticed any pattern to when it happens.

It’s still puzzling us - got us totally foxed right now - but we are persevering with it :nerd:

Peter.

I’m having the same problem. Yesterday I used Audacity 3.0.0 to convert some flac files to wav files and had no problem. Today I tried to open some similar flac files and got the “Failure to open database” error message. I tried opening the flac files used yesterday - same error message. I then tried opening the wav files generated yesterday - again same problem! I’m just using the File-Open-file name in Windows 10.

I get this error every time I attempt to use a macro to process a set of files that is stored under my Microsoft OneDrive. No such issues when the files are under, say, C:\temp. (Audacity 3.0.0 on Windows 10.)

We believe that we fixed this issue for 3.0.2 and if it does occur again there are better diagnostics built in now - so please update to 3.0.2 ad retest.

Peter.

I suspect that your problem is that you are working (or trying to work) with Audacity on a network/cloud drive.

We recommend strongly about not using cloud drives for Audacity projects - and I suspect that running you macro on cloud files is causing Audacity to open temporary projects on the cloud drive.

WC