Unrecoverable startup error in 2.4.2 and earlier

[jarome]

On my Mac Pro running Mojave, I tried to move the temporary storage directory from my small boot disk to an external 2 TB USB drive.
When I do the necessary restart to save the settings, Audacity will not restart with an unrecoverable error! I must delete the app and reinstall. I tried this several times.

[billw58]

On my iMac running Catalina I cannot reproduce this. Is the "SessionData" folder created on the external HD?

-- Bill

[jarome]

Yes, and in fact, audacity created the folder.

Audacitydisk.png (152.8 KiB) Viewed 440 times

[jarome]

It was formatted as ExFAT though. I am reformatting it now into MacOS Journaled. That fixed it!
But if exFAT disks are not allowed, Audacity should tell you so.

[waxcylinder]

Curiously enough I've been testing saving to exFAT USB on Mac with 3.0.0 for a large part of today.

This working mostly fine - albeit extremely slow.

So following your post I tried setting my Temporary files directory to my exFAT USB.

With both 2.4.2 and 3.0.0 latest alpha I get

Audacity Startup Failure
An unrecoverable error has occurred during startup

As folk seem keen for us to support exFat with Audacity on Win and Mac I shall log this as a bug tomorrow.

Thanks for the report, much appreciated

Peter.

[waxcylinder]

On w10 with 2.4.2 and latest 3.0.0 alpha having the Temporary files directory set on an exFAT formatted USB stick works fine.

So this is just a Mac issue.

Peter.

[steve]

I can confirm that exFAT does not work for Audacity's Temp folder.

My speculation is that it may be a permissions issue, as exFAT does not support file permissions.
Probably not a good idea to use exFAT for a hard drive anyway - the format was developed by Microsoft for flash drives.

[waxcylinder]

Once again Jarome thank you so much for alerting us to this issue, very much appreciated

I have logged this as a P1 (release blocking) bug: http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2626

I'm glad you quickly found your workaround and thanks for reporting back with that - a question for you:
Q: is your USB drive fast enough for live projects on Audacity ?

I do a lot of QA testing with USB sticks and drives and I always find them painfully slow when used with live test projects?

Thanks,
Peter.

[jarome]

It is a solid state USB drive, so very fast.

[waxcylinder]

It is a solid state USB drive, so very fast.

Thanks for the update info.

Which make and model is it please?

Peter.