Audacity question

I’m not sure where the best place is to ask this question but it’s an SOS. I was editing on the latest version of audacity 3.1.1 on mac Big SUR. as i’ve been doing for a while and tonight something strange happened- i couldn’t get any commands to work, and the stop button was flickering, and I tried to copy and paste the 2 tracks to a new audacity file , but that didn’t work. Is this a corruption of some sort? does that mean all the edits are gone? I am so upset i can’ t think straight. It’s times like these that I wonder if I shouldn’t be using hindenberg…

any ideas how i can Fix this issue? or at least save and somehow be able to use my file??

thanks

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Not a Mac user. I know 3.1.1 just became available. Have you gone out to YouTube on your phone to search for solutions?

Also, I am aware on the PC side that nothing is lost Don’t panic and Do NOT shut down
:heart:

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@clevpt I’m not a Mac user. I wonder if an update was running in the background so your computer had a resource issue. I might step away for a moment to let it process.

What would Hindenburg give you that is different from Audacity?

I hope you haven’t lost your edits. Sorry not to be able to help further.

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I don’t have anything meaningful to contribute to helping… but you are in the right place. :slight_smile:

First question: 8 hours later, what’s happening now?

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@thearena @AnnieP @craigconstantine
so I was able to get it to work …so far so good, however, I haven’t started editing. I closed out and then shut down my computer. I noticed numbers on my tracks that i have not seen before. I am providing a screenshot. Has Anyone seen this or know what it could be? .22, .29 etc

also anyone understand what the new loop feature is used for in the new audacity edition?

thanks

i wanted to add @steveh to the conversation.

@steveh @thearena @craigconstantine @AnnieP
now i’m getting this message when trying to save
Image 11-16-21 at 2.34 PM
shoot me now

i did move a bunch of files to the trash and deleted the trash

but i still can’t save nor get out of audacity without losing edits(not that many but still) it just is wierd and scary cause

Send your incomplete file to SoundCloud or Dropbox @clevpt

More and more this cascade of problems makes me wonder about bugs in software. Have you just gone out on line and searched for problems with this version on the Mac?

i just saw in the ny post that the cloud crashed and i have everything going through there…I need to find a better system. My drop box is somehow linked also to my hard drive so it’s in both places still taking up room in my computer. I am now trying to move some files over to a hard drive…to see if that helps. @AnnieP thank you

not sure how to send it from audacity to soundcloud and the problem with that is that it will convert to one track and I need to save as 2 tracks. I can save to an mp3 but that doesn’t help

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You should be able to turn off Drop Box (the software from Drop-Box-the-company which is installed on your computer). When you disable stay-in-sync-with-cloud, it should prompt you with something like, “do you want to remove the local copies” — yes. You’ll be left with all the files you have in the dropbox cloud storage and it will free up space on your computer.

…but I don’t use dropbox, so I’m not sure exactly how to do it. DB’s web site should have help articles, no?

@clevpt Go out to SoundCloud and upload it. Can you export the file in audacity? MP3 would be a smaller file than a wav. I don’t know how much if any thing you’d lose. I think if you were a musician this would be hell.

You can work through this Carol. Be compassionate with yourself :heart:

Hi Carole @clevpt there are so many things all happening at the same time for you.

Audacity uses your hard drive as a temporary place to store the work in progress and all of the edits. It sounds like it has swallowed a load of space to the point you can’t save your file.

Dropbox allows you to keep files in the cloud rather than on your hard drive. You can still see them but if you ever want to use them they will be downloaded at that time. You have to turn on smartsync and then for the folder select online only.

If you can sort out Dropbox to store in the cloud it may give enough space to save the file.

Descript also swallows a load of temporary hard drive space when it is working. Close everything else but Audacity if you can.

I think your main problem is hard drive space. I use an app called Disk Cartography to check where the big files are and how much free space there is.

See what you can do and let us know how much space you have.

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Will do and thanks. See you tomorrow on call. Its hard to know if the file is online or on computer because both sre checked. But i will investigate.

I was able to finish edit and now took a piece snd will look at all your notes to practice with sound. My guest was loud and very soft so its all over the place… he had a iphone mic for ears snd held the mic which i learned is not good for consistent sound…

To be continued

Sleep well

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I’m not being flippant - but why not revert to your previous version of Audacity and use that? I’m still on version 2.4.2 !

I don’t see any features worth upgrading for, yet!

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@thearena @AnnieP @steveh
update: I managed to finish editing, I had to push segments together once audacity decided to cooperate. Not sure how the spearation of edits happened but was able to just slide things over. Strange becasue sometimes I was unable to cut and paste into the track in order to create some space…message popped up which said no room to do that, which makes no sense. anyways, I’ll go back to that…and lastly…now that i’m doing my own “sound engineering” i wonder if anyone has suggestions for the very up and down of my guests’ voice…i already did compresssor and normalize. there were a few red peaks which i used the tooll: “clip fix” to get the red peaks lower… besides putting through auphonic is there anything else I can do to make the guest less soft spoken( though at times he’s not)


i think we are supposed to see all the audio to reach at least the 5,is that right? maybe this is as good as I can ger?

the only reason i don’t do that is that I am a follower and had I been given that advice before switching, I would have not switched. Lesson learned, thanks…

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Yeah, @clevpt you persevered! Big win for you Congrats
AnnieP

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well if I can just know that my audio is good enough to post…that would be a bigger win. I now wish i had not upgraded to the latest audacity . I just assumed it would be better, but in fact, the changes are not helping me at the moment and I am unfamiliar with the format. thank you