I have made a whole album on one audacity file. I have replaced the files as I update it so I do not have any backups(regrets).
Suddenly, when I am almost done, Audacity has crashed. The sound would only come out of the left ear for only 3 minutes, then on the whole thing was just consistent noise from one of the songs in the album repeating over and over again. The soundwaves are showing like they are supposed to, everything looks fine except for the volume bar and the overall song.
If you know the solution to this problem, please help. I have worked a lot on this.
Exporting a WAV file at different stages in the project is also an excellent (and even safer) backup.
Did you get the Audacity “Automatic Crash Recovery” dialogue
( http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/recovery.html ) when you restarted Audacity?
If so, assuming you have not saved the incorrect screen contents to the project, you have two choices.
You can look at Help > Show Log…, look for errors and see if you can correct them, for example by putting “missing audio block files” into the indicated subfolder in the _data folder for the project.
Or you could open the last saved state of the project and see if that gives a better result. Find the autosave file Audacity is trying to recover from and move it to your Desktop so Audacity cannot see it. To do that, right-click over the autosave file, Edit > Cut, then Edit > Paste to your Desktop. See here for how to find the autosave file:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audacity_projects.html#autosave .
Then open Windows Task Manager and force quit Audacity. Don’t Save Changes if you are asked. Then restart Audacity (you won’t see “Automatic Crash Recovery”). Use File > Recent Files to open the project AUP file. If the result is worse than the recovery, quit Audacity without making changes, paste the autosave file on the Desktop back where you cut it from, then restart Audacity and you can get the recovered state back.
Gale