I had just opened up Audacity to attempt to edit some things and then the program suddenly crashed. When I re-opened it, it told me to recover the file. I tried clicking on the recover button, but nothing happened. Th recovery window closed and everything froze. So I closed the program and re-opened it. I clicked delete file instead, to the same result. Again I tried, but this time I clicked quit audacity and even that didn’t do anything. After some searching I discovered the file the program is trying to find doesn’t exist (or maybe I just can’t find it.) Any way to make it stop freezing?
I think I am using OS 10.6 Snow Leopard and I would say which Audacity version I’m using but I can’t check at the moment.
Please confirm your version of Mac (Apple menu > About This Mac).
Please tell us your version of Audacity so we can decide what action to take about this problem. Go to the folder where you installed Audacity (for example, /Applications/Audacity/) then right-click or CTRL-click over Audacity.app and choose “Get Info”. The Audacity version should be somewhere near the top, perhaps in a “General” section.
You can stop Audacity attempting to recover by deleting the “AUTOSAVE” file in ~/Library/Application Support/audacity/AutoSave/.
I assume you don’t want to lose those unsaved changes if possible and would like to get those changes back another way. If so, rename the AUTOSAVE file to some other extension, such as “.AUTOE”. This will also stop Audacity attempting to recover, so you can use it for other work.
If it was an already saved project that crashed, just don’t open that project for now.
If the work that crashed had never been saved as a project, the data folder Audacity is trying to recover from is in your Audacity temp folder and you should (to be on the safe side) copy that folder to your Music folder or some permanent location in your own user space. To see where the temp folder is, open the folder ~/Library/Application Support/audacity/ then in there, open the file “audacity.cfg”. You can open it in TextEdit. Don’t edit the file or save it, just look for the line that starts with “TempDir=” (it’s underneath the “[Directories]” line).
We can work out what to do to recover another way, if you want that, when you tell us your Audacity version.
If you can give us some feedback on it that would be appreciated. To test, simply record something unimportant, force quit Audacity then try to recover the project.
That fix has now been tested on 10.6.8 and will be in 2.1.3 when released.
For those still on 2.1.2, I recommend that after the Audacity menus freeze, right-click or CTRL-click over the Audacity icon in the Dock, and choose “Quit”. This will give Audacity proper control again. If you had pressed the button to Recover Projects, say “Yes” to “Save changes?” then you can save a project, or “Cancel” then you can export a WAV.