Hello everyone,
I have Audacity 2.4.2, Windows 10, and a very important Audacity project suddenly crashed on me yesterday. I can’t remember the exact wording that came on the screen when that happened, but it was nothing I had ever encountered before. It said something like “an unknown? or unexpected? error? [or something like that] has occurred” and gave two or three options to me (one or two of which were supposedly to enable me to recover the project). I can’t remember what I chose (because of the tremendous stress of the whole incident), but unfortunately it did not work to recover the entire project intact. I changed the name of the project’s .aup and data files so that I could immediately find out if I could copy and paste one of my back-up copies (from my hard drive) back into Audacity, and find out whether or not this would work, and it did and was very quick and easy. Unfortunately, when the original project crashed yesterday, I was in the process of recording some new tracks (for a song) and had not yet backed some of them up by the time of the crash, so my hard drive/thumb drive copies of the project did not include every track that I had recorded by the time of the crash. By the way, the original project says that there are 481 missing (.au) block data files for it (which it says occurred either because of a “bug, system crash, or accidental deletion of files”), and that Audacity cannot “automatically” recover them. It then says that if I choose either the first or second option listed below (which are to either close the project immediately without making any changes or having Audacity treat the missing files as “silence” for that session), then I could try to locate and recover the missing block files. But I wouldn’t have any idea whatsoever of where to start looking for them, or what to do with them if I did manage to find them.
In addition to all of this confusion and difficulty, I also have a problem (or what could become a problem) with the new version of this project that I copied and pasted from my hard drive. It says that there are “563 orphan block files” in this project which are “unused” by this project and may belong to other projects. It continues by saying that these orphan block files are “doing no harm and are small”, and then gives me the options of continuing the session (yet without deleting these orphan files) or closing the project immediately without making any changes or deleting these files (“permanent immediately”). I can’t remember exactly when in this whole incident it occurred, but at some time when I was copying the project from my hard drive (to paste into Audacity) I believe I accidentally dragged some files from one or more of my backed-up audio files (in my “Music” folder on my hard drive) and I wasn’t at all aware of what might have happened to them (until later when I saw these warnings informing me of the missing block files in the original (crashed) Audacity project and the orphan block files in the version that I copied and pasted from mu hard drive. So, I assume this is not a coincidence, but I can’t figure out exactly how this crossover or exchange of files happened (if it did indeed happen as it would appear that it did).
Can anyone please help me to recover the original project so that I don’t lose the tracks I recorded right before the crash? Right now, the original project shows these tracks but there is apparently nothing to be seen inside the tracks (i.e. the waveforms), nor is there any sound being produced by these tracks.
And, can anyone please tell me what to do about the orphan block files that are now in my copied and pasted version of the project? I want to make sure there is nothing with that situation that could cause trouble in the future with that version of the project/recording.
Thanks,
Dan
Sorry.