Audacity Forum

There's a slim chance that either the Vocal Removeer or Vocal Reduction and Isolation effects may improve it a bit.
See: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/vocal_remover.html
and http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/voca ... ation.html

See here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tools_toolbar.html

Get a SSD?

I'd suggest that you completely remove Audacity from your system and reinstall with the Audacity 2.1.3 installer (download from here: http://www.audacityteam.org/download/windows/) To remove Audacity: 1) Uninstall it in the usual way from the Windows control panel 2) Check where your applications ar...

kozikowski wrote:How are you seeing that?

SciTE

If it was a raw, unedited recording, then it 'may' be possible to recover the recording from the .AU files.
I've not tried this myself but apparently it does work, at least sometimes.
Details are here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/reco ... ually.html

kozikowski wrote:If you open the AUP file in a text editor (don't save anything) you see that it's blank.

Or "Null" characters, depending on your text editor.
Either way, the aup file has no useful data.

My friend's PC crashed right after he saved the project and closed the application. Could this have possibly affected anything? Yes it could. Your friend's PC may have crashed before Audacity had finished writing to disk, which could leave you with an empty or corrupt .AUP file. If you attach the ....

How are you opening the project?
Have you tried from the Audacity "File menu > Open" ?

What does "to contract" mean? "Make smaller" It assumes that you already have a "selection" (highlighted region). I opened a project and tried it. I put my cursor in the waveform. Click and drag across the waveform to create a "selection", and then try Shift+...