Corrupted File!

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Hi everyone,

Mid-recording, my computer crashed forcing me to restart. I was glad to find that audacity recovered the file, but gave me an error saying that it couldn’t recover it properly (or something like that). I ended up with a file with no waveforms, although it has a significant file size. Is there hope to recover my file?

Thanks

2

It’s difficult for us to help without knowing exactly what the error message was.
Which version of Audacity are you using? (look in “Help > About Audacity”)

3

That’s Audacity > About Audacity on a Mac.

If you are using a 1.3 or 2.0 version of Audacity, please click Help > Show Log and see if you can select and copy (Cmnd - C) all the text, then open TextEdit, paste in and save the file. Then attach the text file this way https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-attach-files-to-forum-posts/24026/1 .


Gale

4

I have attached my log to this post. This is just the log that generates when I open the corrupted project.

This project no longer prompts me with an error message though, it just appears as a blank project that runs for a long time.
errorlog.txt (2.33 KB)

5

Thanks for the log. As you guessed there is no longer anything useful in the log.

If you saved the changes to the project with the track empty, that is likely to be the end of the story.

If the project recovery is incorrect and you had already saved an AUP project file that was in a good state, it’s best to quit Audacity without saving the changes. When you reopen Audacity, there will be no recovery dialog, you just need to reopen the project and it should be as it was last saved (assuming the _data folder is accessible and undamaged).

If the project recovery is incorrect and there was no previous AUP file in a good state (which seems to be your case), you should either leave Audacity open, or if you must quit it, force quit Audacity using Command - Option - Esc. That way, the AU data files will not be saved as silence or other incorrect data and you can look if anything useful can be salvaged from the AU files themselves.

From where you are now, the only thing you can do is open the _data folder for the project in Finder (it will be in the same folder as the AUP file) and open a few AU files from each folder in Audacity and see if they contain your recording or silence. If they contain your recording, you can try to resort and rename the AU files, then use the 1.2 Recovery Utility to produce WAV files that you can import into Audacity. See here for help Missing features - Audacity Support .


Gale