Matt Refghi

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If you ever want to distribute Oracle VirtualBox through Intune or SCCM, here’s how you can get an MSI which will make the process a lot easier. Click Windows Hosts to download a Windows copy of VirtualBox. Now that we’re in the downloads over here, let’s go back up one folder and then we’re going to right-click downloads while holding SHIFT. We’re going to select “Open PowerShell window here”, we’re going to do quick “dir” to show where we are… there’s our .exe.

So what I’m about to show you is that you can start typing “Virtual” for example, press Tab and it auto-completes like this, but instead of just running it, we’re going to add a flag here, we’re going to say Extract, and this little pop-up appears. So now to get to this folder, let’s press Windows Key + R and here we can type %LocalAppData%. This is a variable that when you enter it, it will give you the exact path to the local folder within AppData. I’m going to press ENTER and the folder comes up as expected. So I’m going to go to the Temp folder, and what do you know, right here, there’s an actual .msi file.

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So here I have six different images. What if I wanted to permanently delete the penguin? Well, to do that, what I could do is drag the image here to the recycle bin, right-click and say Empty Recycle Bin to delete it forever. Or, what I could do instead is just select the image, press DELETE, that skips the dragging part, and then I can right-click to recycle bin and say Empty Recycle Bin.

But there’s in fact a better way – if I’m sure I want to wipe out this penguin, all I have to do is select the image, or multiple images, hold SHIFT, press DELETE, and then this pop-up comes up. This is asking you if you’re sure you want to permanently wipe out this poor, innocent bird – and in this case, yeah, for the sake of my demonstration I will wipe it out. So I’m going to say yes, and you’ll notice there’s nothing in the recycle bin here – that temporary storage has been skipped, it’s just been deleted, doesn’t exist anymore. That’s good to know when you’re sure you want to delete something.

Transcription

So here I have six different images. What if I wanted to permanently delete the penguin? Well, to do that, what I could do is drag the image here to the recycle bin, right-click and say Empty Recycle Bin to delete it forever. Or, what I could do instead is just select the image, press DELETE, that skips the dragging part, and then I can right-click to recycle bin and say Empty Recycle Bin.

But there’s in fact a better way – if I’m sure I want to wipe out this penguin, all I have to do is select the image, or multiple images, hold SHIFT, press DELETE, and then this pop-up comes up. This is asking you if you’re sure you want to permanently wipe out this poor, innocent bird – and in this case, yeah, for the sake of my demonstration I will wipe it out. So I’m going to say yes, and you’ll notice there’s nothing in the recycle bin here – that temporary storage has been skipped, it’s just been deleted, doesn’t exist anymore. That’s good to know when you’re sure you want to delete something.

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Description

This video covers a very specific issue encountered by some Audacity users, where an “Audacity failed to read from a file in C:” error occurs in one project and afterwards, you can’t even open other projects that were working fine before, as if it corrupts the Audacity install altogether. Given how specific this is, it’s only going to be pertinent and useful for people in that exact situation.

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When it comes to voiceovers for my tutorials, I use a tool called Audacity to record. So here’s what Audacity typically looks like – if I open up this .aup3 project, which is the Audacity project format, you see that the entire file is here, everything works, I see the tracks and I’m able to go through it as I see fit. So now let’s close this. That’s a case that actually works, right?

Now, let’s open up this VirtualBox MSI folder, which is the project I was hoping to open just the other day. So I went ahead and immediately went to launch this file, of course, I did notice the abnormality of there being some temporary files here. And if you have a quick eye, you might have noticed that we just saw them in the Example folder earlier when I opened up the functional project – but let’s get back to that later.

So right now I’m going to launch the AUP3 file here. Immediately, you notice that there is no audio track – considering I spent time recording myself, this was alarming to me. I was like uh, that’s not good – I hope I didn’t lose my footage! So then what I did was I closed, and then look at this! Audacity failed to read from a file in C:. Okay… so then if you click on the problem details, there’s a bunch of information here. It says it failed to read from the file in the . That’s interesting… ProjectFileIO::GetDiskUsage::step. So my immediate thought was okay, is there a problem with the amount of space that I have? But then if you actually check this PC here, you’ll notice that there is plenty of space. So not quite sure what’s happening here. So I continued from here, closed Audacity, and then I figured alright, maybe I lost that recording but I can wrok on another one, so I went back to my functional project, opened up this, and bang, look at this error. Exception code 0xc0000005, a bunch of zeros and 5. Exception access violation read. Whoa, okay, this is scary, because now if I can’t open my old projects, what do I do? I certainly don’t want it to remember this glitched state.

Okay, here I’ll say don’t send, but Audacity didn’t open. Alright, so let me see if I can just open Audacity by itself. Oh… automatic crash recovery. So here it actually sees that I had some trouble with my VirtualBox MSI project, and it says it’s recoverable. As you can imagine I’m enthusiastic to recover that project, so I click that project, so I click recover selected… and I get a whole lot of nothing. So then I end up trying to close it again, and I get the same error. Oh, now we’re in a loop, aren’t we? So I’ll click “don’t send”, still in this project, so I’ll X it out and it’s closed, okay.

So that’s what’s scary here. Not only does it cause an error with the project that had a problem, but you can’t recover it… and then when you open a normal project, you’re stuck in the same loop. The way that I found to fix this, despite what I was searching for online, and there were some decent suggestions to be fair, people were suggesting roll back a version, that might fix it. Problem is, when you do that, you still can’t open recordings from a higher version. It makes sense because Audacity doesn’t recognize the format.

So what I do ultimately to fix this is actually uninstall Audacity, but it’s not that simple, so watch this. Add or remove programs, and here’s Audacity – I’m going to go ahead and uninstall that. Are you sure you want to complete remove Audacity and all its components? You bet! Uh-oh, some elements could not be removed, these can be removed manually. Okay. That’s what I mean, it’s not that simple, so I’m going to go to File Explorer, then I’m going to go to this PC, C drive, program files, keep in mind, in my case it’s here, because I have this 64-bit version of Audacity for you, it might be in the other folder here, program files x86. So I’m going to back to program files here, here’s the Audacity folder, there’s clearly some stuff left over, so I’m going to back up here and I’m going to try to delete this folder, going to hold SHIFT, and press DELETE to trigger this, which is a permanent delete of the folder. Going to click yes, and look at this – can’t be completed because the folder or file is open in another program. Is it, thought? Because if you see here, it’s not running.

Well, see, that’s the tricky part – let’s press Cancel, and go to Task Manager. So as you can tell, Audacity is actually running in the background – I’m going to hold CTRL so things stop moving, and I’m going to right-click Audacity and then click End Task. So that’s going to kill it – but just so you’re aware, there’s one more thing you might see in this list that’s going to cause problems, and it’s the file we saw here, crashpad_handler.exe. If crashpad handler is still running, it’s the same thing, it won’t allow you to uninstall. But I didn’t see it running in the list here, in fact, I’ll search for crash, see? It’s not running, so we’re not going to have the issue. Basically I’m going to close this now, program files, Audacity, and now I’m going to hold shift again, I’m going to press delete at the same time, and I will choose to permanently delete this folder. There you go – no more Audacity.

Now, we need to get it back, right? Okay, so once Audacity is re-installed, all you’ve got to do is relaunch it, so the first thing you’ll see is that it’s going to still remember the fact that the project failed before. At this stage, the difficult decision that has to be made is we have to discard the selected project. So I just did that and I’m now going to close Audacity, and I’m going to try and launch it again just to confirm I’m not getting the prompt anymore. Okay, so no more prompt. I’m also not going to launch my discarded project, I’m not going to go back in there, because we know it’s going to mess up Audacity. Instead I’m going to go to my real example here, which should be functional. And as you can tell, the project now opens. It doesn’t open up in an error like last time. This is comforting of course because I spent time on the recording. Okay, so I’m going to close this.

And now we’re back. Now, as we just saw, those temporary files, which I’ll show you again. There’s temporary files that appear here when I’m working on the project. One of them is SHM, one them is WAL, right? So let’s go back to the VirtualBox folder – when I go back to that folder, there’s only one file now. Earlier, we saw that there was actually an SHM and a WAL file. So what happens to these files when I close the project? You might have already seen it – when I close Example, the files go away. So most likely VirtualBox MSI, my Audacity project, was closed in a state where it was like still in progress, somehow I managed to close this thing before it was actually complete. So of course it’s kind of in a corrupt, half-saved state, so that explains what happened.

Anyway guys, that was a little scary for me because I couldn’t open even my old functional projects. It’s one thing to lose one Audacity project, it’s another thing to lose the ability to edit any of them. So I hope this helps!

Transcription

If you’re the type that feels that the taskbar in Windows 11 takes up too much visual space, here’s how you can hide it. Simply move the mouse to the taskbar, select “Taskbar settings” – and when this comes up, simply scroll down to the “Taskbar behaviors” section, left-click that, and then you’ll see an option called “Automatically hide the taskbar”. Just select that, and you’ll notice the taskbar immediately disappeared at the bottom. To make it re-appear, I have to move the mouse down here. So again, I’ll move the mouse away – it hides, move the mouse back, it comes back up.

I’m going to close this window now. When I close that window, the taskbar came back up, and it’s not leaving. Well, that’s because it thinks it’s in focus – there’s a bit of nuance to how the taskbar auto-hide works, but once thing I can tell you – when it’s in this state, if you click on the desktop, it’s going to hide again. Because it thinks you’re focusing on what’s on the desktop.

You can also press the Windows button, for example, and that will make the taskbar re-appear. Let’s say I press it again, it will disappear. You’ll learn more about this as you use it, it’s typically for people that want to see their wallpaper at all times, and want the least visual clutter possible.