Help! I have an aup3 file that I was working on all day yesterday and today — I had basically finished the project and just needed to output it — that now only gives me “Audacity failed to read from a file in C:” when I try to open it.
I don’t remember anything being unusual or problematic about the last time I worked on it or closed it. Well, apart from Audacity frequently crashing during the “deleting undo history” phase when it’s closing, which has been happening ever since I updated to 3.7.1. (At first it scared me, but after a while I became convinced that it never affected files that had already been saved to disk, and was effectively just an inconvenience, in that that it required me to “discard recovered projects” on the next startup. If it was the cause of the current corruption, this will have been the first time it had an effect on a project file, after more than 100 openings-and-closings of projects. I saw other posts from people experiencing the same thing and was kind of just hoping it would get fixed in a future version if I sat tight…)
Some years ago I was able to use the Audacity Project Tools to recover a corrupted project, so I attempted that, but the tool doesn’t seem to have been updated in more than a year. It warns me “DANGER!!! Unsupported Audacity version detected! Project data might be lost! Proceed with caution!” When I press ahead, it generates a “broken.recovered.aup3” that my system associates with an older installation of Audacity elsewhere on my drive (3.6.4), but that cannot successfully be opened by either 3.6.4 or 3.7.1 (which still gives “Audacity failed to read from a file in C:”)
Losing this project completely will be very painful and I will take any help I can get. Is there anything at all that can be done to help the recovery tool to work? Is there a newer version to try? Is there anything I could try with the project file in a hex editor, say, to get Audacity to give it another shot?