So I recorded about half an hour of material today and everything was working fine, but then when I played it back and listened to it, about 10 minutes in, the sound just disappears and the soundwaves turn into a flatline. The entire recording is now a flatline and there is no sound anywhere. Please help me! I’m scared to close it and try to recover it in case it’s already salvageable where it’s at now (the file is still open) but I also don’t want the autosave files to get overwritten if I leave the project open for too long as is??
I have Audacity 2.0.3. and I’m using Windows 7. Help as soon as possible would be extremely appreciated!
If you need to close Audacity, force quit it in Task Manager then the recorded data should not get discarded or overwritten with silence while you are investigating.
If you had searched you would have found lots of posts about this. Most likely you installed Norton or a cleanup tool. If so it has deleted your recordings because those tools do that, thinking Audacity’s temporary data is no longer wanted.
Unless such a tool deletes files to the Windows Recycle Bin or to its own Recycle Bin or Quarantine area, the files are gone, short of trying a data recovery app like Pandora.
To prevent that happening again, configure the tool, or File > Save Project As… in Audacity before recording and save to your Desktop or Music folder. Or open Edit > Preferences… then “Directories” and type in a new location for your Audacity temp folder that does not have “temp” in its name.
The only other explanation is that wherever your Audacity temp folder is, Audacity cannot read that folder any longer. It could be a failing drive or permissions problem.