Audactity has corrupted two different projects in the same week

Audacity 3 Help Forum
1

I recently returned to Audacity after a 2 year break and updated to 3.7.7. In the space of a day or so, it appears to have corrupted to projects, both after many hours of extensive editing. In a dozen years of using Audacity I have NEVER lost work before and now twice in a week is unimaginable. In both cases it’s saying “Audacity failed to read from a file in D:” I don’t know how to read the problem details. Is this work lost forever? Has anyone else seen this, is this a known issue? Is the project recoverable?

{
“timestamp”: 1768868284,
“event_id”: “2827d7fd871b5046b00f0427b583a3a9”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.7.7”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Windows”,
“version”: “10.0.26200”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “File_Error”,
“value”: “Audacity failed to read from a file in .”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false,
“data”: {
“sqlite3.rc”: “11”,
“sqlite3.context”: “SqliteSampleBlock::Load::step”
}
}
}
]
}
}

2

That’s very frustrating, I imagine. Details about the error and what to do can be found here: https://support.audacityteam.org/troubleshooting/recovering-corrupted-projects.
Hope that helps.

3

Those who have read my posts for some time are probably tired of me harping, “Audacity really should link to a Current Stable Release version.”

1 Like
5

Davej975, did you get a solution?

6

Unfortunately, no. I tried the Recovery Corrupted Files procedure someone recommended at the top of the thread, but it essentially failed. I had been working on cleaning up an hour-long audio file, and after running the repair, the majority of the audio was lost. I appear to have lost many hours of work unless there’s some sort of magic fix out there.

7

Man, my sympathies. I just created a post nearly identical to yours, and unless someone can help, I’m in the same boat. It’s bizarre that it happened to both of us on the same day.

8

Dude! I got mine back! If you save or otherwise backup to OneDrive, go online to your account, go into your files section, find the file, and right click. It should give you an option to check version history. Open that and you should see however many older versions are there. Click one that you know functioned before the meltdown.

Click ‘Restore’.

Go back into your main OneDrive file and right click the restored file. It should have today’s date and the new time stamp on it. It may also be smaller than the corrupted file, but that’s not the point.

Right click ‘download’ and save it somewhere safe. Do NOT attempt to open it directly from OneDrive. Get it on the ground in your machine first.

Then either go into Audacity and open the file (from its safe location), or else go to the folder where the file is saved and open it from there.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you, but it worked for me.

Good luck, man.

1 Like
9

Sorry that the audacity tools didn’t work for you. If you are willing to share the two wonky files, I will have a stab to see how I fare. One way to share would be to upload to Google Drive (or similar) and post the link to the files. Another good way is to use Swisstransfer.com to send them. You will need my email address for that which I could send in a private message. Let me know, OK?

1 Like
10

Thank you for offering! I don’t care a ton about the first corrupted file, but I would love to recover the other one. I am happy to share it with you, there’s nothing proprietary or personal in it. Here is the file:

s07e02.aup3

Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing it.

11

Thank you! This is an interesting mitigation and I will give this a shot!

12

Thank you! I don’t care a ton about the first corrupted file, but I would love to recover the other one. I am happy to share it with you, there’s nothing proprietary or personal in it. I tried posting a link to the file but I got an error and I think it was treated as spam. Sorry, I don’t know my way around this forum very well. IN any event, if you don’t see the link, let me know and we can share it another way.

13

I’m sorry but I could not recover your project. I tried every step in the audacity project tools list and another utility but it kept saying ‘database disk image is malformed’. The developers might be able to help but I can’t fix it.

14

Thank you so much for trying.

I used Audacity weekly for a decade to produce several different podcasts, and never had the slightly problem with the app’s stability or with losing data. But returning to the app after a two-year break and upgrading to the latest version, this happens twice in the same week. Let me ask you: In your experience, is Audacity no longer trustworthy?

15

I can’t tell you which version of Audacity I’m using because I am not at home, but I never install the latest version of any program on my computers. And really, as long as the version I’m currently using does everything I need, I’ll keep it where it is. I prefer to let others shake out the problems.

Really my only exception to that is when I hear about a bad security problem with a program.