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I've recently started experimenting with dual-booting Ubuntu 18.04 on my Windows 10 machine in hopes of eventually building a full linux rig down the line. I work on a lot of sound projects, so having good audio equipment is important to me.

However, after installing audacity, I found that I could not import audio into the program from external or secondary internal disks on my system, something that I had no trouble doing on my Windows machine. If I try to import from the menu (file>Import>Audio) none of the other drives even show up in the lists, despite being perfectly accessible through Nautilus. If I try to drag and drop my audio files into Audacity, like I generally do when working in Windows, I get this message: "Audacity did not recognize the type of the file '/mnt/D488FFDD88FFBBD4/Voice Acting/Completed Projects/Completed Audio/Filename.mp3.' Try installing FFmpeg. For uncompressed files, also try File>Import>Raw Data."

I get this message no matter what sort of file type I try to drop into audacity from either an external drive or the internal mounted drives. However, when I move or copy the file onto my home partition (onto the Ubuntu desktop or one of the home folders, like music or documents for instance) it works perfectly fine. The problem is, I don't want to have to save my files on that part of the system, as it's on a fairly small partition and it is much easier working with all the pieces from the other internal drives. Can anyone here give any help or advice? I've looked around, but I haven't seen any explanation yet.

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  • Welcome to AskUbuntu, I guess this could be the problem of ownership and usergroup of audacity. Linux has a different file/folder attribution. man chmod man chown. If you are talking about Linux on Windows and you run Ubuntu as an application, that makes much complicated. Mar 17, 2020 at 5:55
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    Hello, and thank you for the response. No, I'm running Ubuntu as its own separate operating system, installed alongside windows. The hard drives are internal, set to automount when I log onto Ubuntu.
    – Goombasa
    Mar 17, 2020 at 15:03
  • Then that sounds like audacity can't work beyond different file systems, e.g. NTFS (Win) and ext (Linux). Audacity forum is the right place to get a certain feedback. And my opinion, Ubuntu Studio is a sort of ideal tool for a musician or audio-visual editors, consider having one more computer for it. Mar 18, 2020 at 1:59
  • I have audacity running on one ubuntu pc and my music on a different ubuntu pc. The music share is mounted via cifs in the fstab. I can drag files out of the share and drop them on audacity and it works fine. So I agree with the other commenter, what you have is likely a permissions problem, because I demonstrate that it can work. Jun 30, 2020 at 18:07

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I think this is a snap issue. I resolved it by enabling Read/write files on removable storage devices (see 1034030).

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  • Worked for me! Thanks a lot!
    – Aidos
    Aug 19, 2022 at 7:25
  • Solved my problem as well, thanks.
    – Joshua
    Dec 30, 2022 at 17:50
  • should be accepted as solution
    – kdarras
    May 24, 2023 at 17:44

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