Posts Tagged ‘Audacity’

What to do when Audacity won’t let you export/save as (blank dialog box).

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

It would logically follow that if I’ve had this problem others must also have had it or be having it on a regular basis now. Unfortunately I don’t know how to trigger the problem and so I’m unable to provide you with a picture.

Versions: Caught in 1.3.4 and 1.3.5, haven’t tested anything else.

Symptoms: CPU usage climbs to 100% and when you click ‘export’ or ’save as’ you get a standard export/save dialog box but without a path or any files/directories shown. It refuses to let you search or manually input a path.

Possible related problem: I had this problem last immediately after the same project had got stuck while loading the audio into the memory. The issues might be related but I can’t see any reason to suspect that myself.

Solution: It’s not that hard but it took me a little while to work it out. Make a small edit and save, this seems to work every time. If it doesn’t then save and restart Audacity.

What doesn’t work: I tried all the normal tricks.

  • # killall audacity
  • # killall -9 audacity
  • Moving the files around
  • Renaming them
  • Manually comparing the .aup with other .aup’s and trying to fix.

Diagnosis: Bug, probably a stomach one. I honestly can’t see where the problem is, I’ve tried looking for it but don’t have the time to do full strace’s and all the rest of that fun stuff. Let’s hope the audacity team manage to find it and fix it. After all, Audacity is a brilliant tool even if it does lack a few things.

Kind regards, Robert.

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