Last night was recording an episode of my podcast when there was an emergency and I had to leave. In my haste, I forgot to turn off the recording.
Well I come back and it’s one 19+ hour recording. I figure, no problem I’ll end it, trim out the 18+ hours of filler and we’re good right?
Wrong. Well it crashes, and when I turn it back on it asks me if I want to recover it which of course I do. When I click it, it then crashes and I’m forced to quit the program.
I’m guessing it’s a goner, but is there anyway I can recover this recording? I’m using Mac OSX btw.
Which Audacity? If it’s an older version, you only get about 13 hours before the performance management folds over and destroys the original show. So even if it does come back, you’re likely to get Dead Air or whatever the show was at the 13 hour mark.
Newer Audacity versions can have the drivespace problem. Internally, Audacity works at a very high quality standard. That makes production easy and clear, but it takes up a lot of room. Then, anytime Audacity has to “Do Something,” it makes a copy of the whole show as an UNDO backup. You could need enough space for a super high quality 57 hour recording. So did you run out of drive space?
Past that, we need to wait for one of the senior Forum Elves. I know the current supported Audacity 2.1.2 doesn’t have that 13-hour problem any more, but I’m fuzzy after that.
Koz
Where did Audacity crash? When you were deleting 18 hours of silence?
To stop Audacity trying to recover the bad project, open Finder, Go > Go to Folder and type:
~/Library/Application Support/audacity/AutoSave
In that AutoSave folder, rename the AUTOSAVE file to some other extension such as .AUTO.
Then follow Recovering crashes manually to attempt making new WAV files from the AU files in the temporary data folder. You will need to make a number of WAV files and join them up, because the recovery utility you will use can’t make a new WAV file much over 1 GB.
If it was a stereo performance, some sections of audio will have left and right transposed in the recovered files.
You could instead attach the AUTOSAVE file in case we can see why it might be crashing. This would be the better solution, but with less chance of success. Please see here for how to attach files: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-attach-files-to-forum-posts/24026/1
If you need more help, please tell us the full Audacity version (all three numbers).
Gale