Audacity 2.0.0
I recorded it on my Laptop Vista, Home Premium 2007 Service Pack 2
I’ve been using Windows XP Professional, Version 2002, Service Pack 3 on my desktop to try to recover the recording.
Don’t remember whether I obtained the .exe installer of the zip.
How can I recover the recording using the data *.au files?
I accidentally deleted the *.aup file and the *.au data files; however using undelete I recovered some of the data files.
I tried using FILE ->IMPORT-> RAW DATA with tantalizing results, i.e., some of the six second portions were restored; however many were not.
Also tried FILE ->IMPORT->AUDIO.
Furthermore, I’m not sure how the *.au files are named. What is the naming convention? How are they sequenced?
I lost 1.5 hours of an important lecture.
I’ve been using Audacity for a long time; got over confident; and accidentally trashed the first 1.5 hours of an important lecture by not creating a NEW Program file for the next portion of the lecture.
Thanks for your help.
Gus
Tantalizing or not, without auto recovery or the AUP file, the chance of full recovery is zero. As you may have noticed, they’re not all sound clips and they alternate left/right. So there is a very, very remote chance of recovery if you have all the files. You might recover most of the project by sorting dates. But with some files missing, mislabeled, or misdated because of Disk Recovery, that’s probably the end of the show.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/recovery.html
Koz
Koz,
thanks for your prompt reply.
Are the .au files stored in sequence serially?
How are they named? Hexadecimally?
What is the function of the .au files which do not contain audio?
Was there a major change in the .au file structure in 2.0.0 compared to the earlier versions?
Best wishes,
Gus
What is the function of the .au files which do not contain audio?
They are timeline picture files. There may be others, but I know about those.
Did you read through that manual recovery wiki? I don’t know any more about it than that. I know there used to be a relatively simple file naming convention, but it vanished into a much more complex system. I don’t remember the switch version. 1.2 > 1.3? It’s been a while.
It was common to achieve at least partial success by lining up the file date and time flags. I think it was a very common problem to switch left and right by accident, and, I’m in deep water here, if you did any editing or production, I think you’re dead without the AUP project manager file. The clips don’t line up any more.
Koz
Thanks, Koz,
I like that metaphor of the structure vanishing into a more complex system.
Time line pictures. Hmm, interesting concept. Nifty.
I realize, now, thanks to you, that without the aup file recovery will be next to impossible unless I can reverse engineer a solution.
A friend pointed me to the Recovery Manual Wiki Tuesday evening. For some reason it’s much more extensive than the version I found earlier. The unabridged version looks promising.
thanks for your kind reply.
Gus 
it vanished into a much more complex system.
The way I understand it, the new system makes Automatic Recovery much more likely. When you restart Audacity after a disaster, it will offer to put your show back together for you and it succeeds much more now than it used to. However, being binary, it also destroys any chance of manual recovery if that doesn’t work.
I’ve said this problem will continue until a developer loses a recording of his daughter’s grade school performance and he has to explain it to his wife. Sleeping in the car does wonders for the creative juices.
Koz
This is the page http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Crash_Recovery#Automatic_recovery_tools . But it is fairly pointless if you lost many of the AU files in the data recovery. And even more pointless if the recovered AU files don’t have their original timestamp.
Gale
Also please update to the latest Audacity 2.0.5: http://audacityteam.org/download/windows .
Gale