It has happened to me, that Audacity has stopped to work, and than I have 350 temporary .au files, which I would like to put together, to have one “normal” .auv file, and can hear the complete recording.
When you save an Audacity project as <project_name> it creates a number of things
- a top level master project file called <project_name>.aup
- a folder at the same filing level called <project_name>_data
- and within the folder a sub-folder structure with lots of little .au files - segments of the recording (mainly audio clips - but a couple of them are graphics files)
When you re-open a project with Audacity you should always open the <project_name>.aup top level file. This tells Audacity how to thread together all the little .au files. It is deliberately designed this way so that Audacity doesn’t have to open and work with a single humungously large file, which would hamper performance. You should not be attempting to open or manipulate any individual .au files.
When you have finished editing your Audacity project you can Export it from Audacity as a WAV file or MP3 file depending what sound quality you wish to achieve. WAV files are around ten times larger than the equivalent MP3 files but are uncompressed and thus the audio quality is higher.
WC