Audacity project won't save

[alfiebb]

Hello,
When I upgraded to Audacity 1.3 12-beta, I noticed it was not saving my project when I closed the application, so I began to only use it when I knew I could do an audio project in one sitting, and then transfer it to another application for use with photos or video. But now I am working on longer projects and this is no longer feasible and I must save the project somehow on Audacity -- or find another audio program. I downloaded this version of Audacity again recently to see if that would make a difference, and it does not. Each time I quit Audacity, I lose the project in play no matter how many times I save it. Does anyone have any tips?
My operating system is Mac OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.4.
Thanks!

[billw58]

Are you saying that you choose File > Save Project, pick a place to save it, then later there is no ".aup" file there? There is nothing in File > Open Recent ? That is very strange. I'm using 1.3.12 on OS X 10.5.8 and have not seen this problem.

-- Bill

[kozikowski]

Even if you try to save the Project on the desktop?

Do you put dates in your filenames? Stop doing that. Macs don't react well to the slash character.

Upper and lower case letters, numbers, dash, and underscore. Try saving a show with just those characters.

Also try saving one show with a filename that can't possibly be anything else. We've had people run into troubles trying to overwrite older files.

Also try...

Go > Utilities > Disk Utilities > Repair Permissions and Verify Disk.

While you're in there, make sure your disk isn't over 80% full. 90% and the machine starts acting funny and 99% the Mac stops working.

You understand that Audacity does not save sound files, right? A Project in its simplest form is an AUP management file and a _DATA folder with a bunch of stuff in it. flute-solo.aup and flute-solo_data folder. Double click on the AUP file and the show should open. Do Not Move or Rename either the aup file or the _data folder.

Koz

[kozikowski]

<<<I noticed it was not saving my project when I closed the application>>>

Audacity does not save a Project when you close the program. You have to File > Save or File > Save As.

Koz

[alfiebb]

When I close a project -- yes, I'm saving it often and saving as on the desktop-- then reopen it in Audacity to continue working on it, I get a message that says "Error Opening Project. Error: reference t invalid character number at line 9." I never saw this error in previous versions of Audacity.

[kozikowski]

I know in a generic sense what that is. An aup file is computer programming language that looks like this...

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/aup1.jpg

You can open up your aup file in TextEdit and read it. You may need to push your window really wide so the lines don't fold over onto new lines.

Count down nine lines and there may be a damaged character on that line. That's as far as I can go because TextEdit will not always show you damaged characters. Audacity 1.3 was supposed to be relatively immune to this problem. Are you sure you're in Audacity 1.3??

Koz

[alfiebb]

Yes, it's 1.3.12 beta. I installed it again a second time to see if that would make a difference, but it's the same problem. I've used two previous versions of Audacity and this never happened, though older versions would crash from time to time and so far this has not crashed. Thanks for the repair tip but I'll only use this version of Audacity on short projects that I can do without quitting the application. I'll keep checking back to see if there's an update and I'm happy to pay for it if it's stable.

[billw58]

Re-installing won't help. The problem is that you've somehow gotten a weird character in the "tags" portion of the .aup file. Could you upload the .aup file to the forum and attach it to a message? Just the .aup file, not the _data folder. That way we'll be able to show you exactly which line you need to edit. Also, next time, before you save a project, go to File > Open Metadata Editor and clear every field.

If you don't want to bother uploading the .aup file, you can open one of the problematic project files in TextEdit and clear everything between and including <tags> and </tags>. Save the file without changing the extension (TextEdit may want to append ".txt" to the end of the file name - don't let it do that).

-- Bill

[alfiebb]

Wow! That text edit move worked. Or rather, it was easy enough for me to do myself, which is saying something. Thanks to Bill and Koz for the tips. Now I know how to save the files in the future.
Linda

[billw58]

Now I know how to save the files in the future.

Linda:
You shouldn't need to do that every time. What happens (usually) is that you import an MP3 file into a project, and the metatdata in the MP3 file contains some of those weird characters that Audacity chokes on. If you're just recording, this should (obviously) never happen. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to do File > Open Metadata Editor before saving just to be sure, but in my experience the problem you had is rare.

-- Bill