Windows 10 Audacity 2.2.1 How to recover raw data

I made a stereo (telephone recording) and mistakenly did not save project as an audacity file and did not export as an MP3 file. Therefore, I have a long string of audacity raw data files. I would like to know how to recover these files. I have tried Audacity Recovery Utility Version 1.1 but it will not recover a long string of raw data and the recording was done a long time ago and therefore I cannot find a recent version.

Now that I am more familiar with audacity I am not making the same mistake BUT I would still like to recover the data for my research.

Thank you in advance.

did not save project as an audacity file

You can’t help it. When you save a Project, Audacity will produce an AUP project manager file and a _DATA folder with the music (or show) in it. What you did with it after that is a different problem.

I only know of one technique of rescuing a show from an orphan _DATA folder and it doesn’t work so well with a stereo show. You may get a show back but it will reverse left and right at random.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recovering_crashes_manually.html

Koz

Hello Koz

Thank you. From what you say it is almost impossible to convert the raw data into an aup file. Is that correct?

Chapco

Do you know which version of Audacity was used to make the recording? The project format changed between the 1.2.x series and the 2.x series. Whichever version, the chances of recovery are not good, but there’s a chance that it’s possible. How to go about recovery depends on the version of Audacity.

If a later version of Audacity was used, and if the project is a copy of the original project, then recovery will not be possible.
If it was a very early version of Audacity, or if the project still exists in the same location that it was originally saved, then recovery ‘may’ be possible.

What happened when you tried?

Steve wrote

Do you know which version of Audacity was used to make the recording? The project format changed between the 1.2.x series and the 2.x series. Whichever version, the chances of recovery are not good, but there’s a chance that it’s possible. How to go about recovery depends on the version of Audacity.

If a later version of Audacity was used, and if the project is a copy of the original project, then recovery will not be possible.
If it was a very early version of Audacity, or if the project still exists in the same location that it was originally saved, then recovery ‘may’ be possible

Audacity 2.2.1 was used to make the recording. The project still exists in the same location that it was originally saved. In brief, all I have are a lot of many 6 second strings. When I try to the recovery utility it says that the file contains no audio. I wonder if I am using the recovery tool wrong?

I’ve not done this myself, so I can’t offer any first hand experience, but the best information that we have is this page: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recovering_crashes_manually.html

I have been using Audacity less than a year, this is my first post to the forum, so please understand I do not yet know how best to do this. I have a question, not an answer, related to this thread.

I had a version of Audacity, downloaded I think less than a year ago, version unknown, on my Win 7 laptop. On it, I successfully recorded with Audacity audio files, all separately in file folders of ancient cassette tapes of audio recordings of family members now deceased, and with some original tapes no longer in existence. After getting all the audio files, which required weeks of cassette playback, I began editing the files, and successfully burned some CDs, for family members, starting with my mother’s funeral. Then the laptop died in a way that it could not by myself or the “Geek Squad” at my local electronics store even be restarted. That laptop was replaced by my current Win 10 used HP Pavilon Entertainment PC laptop. I was able to recover the hard drive from the old laptop with all of the data files, and copied them (took days) to the new laptop, putting what I thought was all of the audio files into the new hard drive on the new laptop. At that time I did not understand the importance of AUP files, or search for them.

When I go to open the files, I seem to have data files only, no AUP files, if they exist, I cannot find them. An individual data file is only a few seconds long, but can be read by Audacity which I downloaded yesterday to my new laptop, and I can year a few seconds of sound, per file.
Audacity now is version 2.2.1, as mentioned I do not know the version used to do the recording. The question is, what if anything can I do to recover the data files? The data files for each cassette tape are in a separate folders. I did not try to copy the Audacity program files from the old hard drive to the new computer, as I knew I would have to download Audacity to the newer machine. I suspect the AUP files were somewhere in with the program files. The old hard drive has been formated, and re-purposed as an external hard drive. Thanks for any body that can help.

Steve and Grwillie

It seems a lot of people have this problem: how to recover the data files that were not saved as aup files. As Steve kindly pointed out there are solutions but none of them seem to work for me or, to be honest, I have no idea how to follow the guidelines.

For example, the instructions from manual recovery make no sense to me but they might work for you Grwillie: from http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recovering_crashes_manually.html
Manual recovery
If you only have a few AU files to recover, use the “Import Audio” command to open all the .au files from the Audacity temporary folder or project _data folder. Use shift-click or control-click to select multiple files. The files will be in approximately 6-second chunks and will be on separate tracks in the Audacity screen. Files from stereo tracks will alternate between left and right channels.

Click in the Track Control Panel (by the Mute/Solo buttons) of the topmost track.
Shortcut Z or Select > Region > Ends to Zero Crossings.
Edit > Remove Special > Trim.
Click in the Track Control Panel of the first track you want to join to the topmost track.
Shortcut Z or Edit > Find Zero Crossings.
Shortcut Z or Select > Region > Ends to Zero Crossings.
Click after the end of the topmost track.
Press End on the keyboard.
Click Edit > Paste and the cut track will attach to the end of the topmost track.
Repeat as necessary to join all the tracks onto the topmost track.
Play the result.

Cut and paste as needed if any files are found to be in the wrong order or the wrong channel.