I have a Macbook Air OSX 10.9.4. Recently I used audacity to record an interview. I did not save it, however, until I got home. When I opened audacity to save, the program froze. I had no choice but to shut it down, open it back up again. It offered me the chance to recover the files. I agreed to that option. But then it told me that there were problems in the automatic recovery and that it found file inconsistencies during recovery.
When I look at the file now I can see the minute times (22 min) but there is no sound just a mute file.
Audacity was still working when you woke up your Air, right? I’ve done that with no troubles. Did you change anything between the interview and later, like disconnect a USB microphone? In that case, Audacity would have woken up to unstable conditions.
No, I had nothing connected to the USB port during or after the interview. I just had the audacity application open on my laptop for a while, while I was doing other things. I just minimized the icon that showed what I had recorded. When I brought it back up again, it was frozen and needed it to be shut down.
the audacity application open on my laptop for a while, while I was doing other things.
OK, so I still don’t have this whole thing. How did you record the interview? Exact physical conditions. Were you both speaking into the Air? I’ve done that with a MBP.
What were the “other things?”
All you did was minimize Audacity into an icon and then blow it back to a normal screen again later? No closing the lid or putting the Air to sleep (same thing)?
We were both speaking into close vicinity to the laptop. We ran a test, it worked. After we were done the interview, I replayed some of the audio again to make sure it worked. And it did.
But I did not save it, because I decided to wait until I got home. By closing it the mac went to sleep.
Is there a time frame under which temporary files in audacity decide to be emptied out?
As I had audacity recordings minimized, I decided to get to work on various other things like working on Microsoft word, etc.
When I finally maximized the audacity icon, the application froze and I was forced to close it and reopen it again. When it did that, it asked me to recover the file, and I said yes. Now I’ve tried saving it, and exporting it under different formats (wav, etc.) and I hear nothing, however the exact minute times (22min) are still there. So I’m wondering where the sound files have gone, if they still exist?
If the recovered project opened with a flat line, then exporting it as WAV will be a flat line. You would have needed to look at Help > Show Log… to see what the errors were.
If the recovery is incorrect you must either find out why and put the files in the location indicated in the log, or force quit Audacity from the Dock until you can fix the issue.
If you saved the project while it was recovered as a flat line, then you overwrote the temporary data (which may or may not have had actual audio) with silence and saved it as a silent project. Unfortunately Audacity did what you told it to do and there is no recovery from there.