I did 3 hours of editing and was 70% done with my episode Audacity crashed. It relaunched, and I was given the option to use an autosave recovery file. When it opened, it asked me if I wanted to view the log. Clicking on the button to view the log crashed Audacity again.
On this second startup my option to use the autosave was gone. I figure none of this mattered, as I had a clean save file of the .aup from before I made any of these new edits (I save every 15 minutes). Opening this file shows me with the section of audio I had last cut from the project, and the entire remainder of the project is just silence.
Obviously annoying at the hours lost, plus the time spent trying to get this back. I can re-edit, I have the source audio files for the show. But I’m paranoid the program is going to crash again and I’ll lose all files.
I edit two mono tracks so I don’t know how I could save as a WAV along the way (as some have suggested).
I’ve attached the .aup. I realize by the time someone response I’ll probably have re-edited the project, but maybe this is a problem I’ll continue to have so I would like to know if there’s a solution/best practice.
AUP files can be uploaded directly to the forum - no need to zip it.Zipping the file is useful if you are going to include the “_data” folder, but then the ZIP file will probably be too big to upload to the forum (2 MB limit).
Any idea what you were doing when it crashed?
Hooray!
So good to hear that. Nothing worse than having to record all over (well, yes there are much worse things, like plague and war, but you know what I mean).
What I do when working on important projects, is to make frequent “snapshots” of the project using the new feature: “Save Lossless Copy of Project” (File Menu: Save Project - Audacity Manual). I number each snapshot with a unique name. For example:
episode_15-0001.aup
episode_15-0002.aup
episode_15-0003.aup
…
This can require a lot of disk space, but as they are not “working copies” (just backups), it’s OK to save these on an external USB drive. (It’s best for projects that you are working on to be on an internal drive).
I appreciate the advice on those lossless copies of the project. I will start using them immediately.
As to what caused the crash, I was copy/pasting about 20 seconds of audio, and deleting some. Just general editing really. When the program came back up the only audio left in the file was that which I had copied to the clipboard.
The recording was very long (over 2 hours). I’ve read that can cause problems with memory over time (The session spanned 12 hours off and on). I’ll be cutting into chunks from now on and edit smaller sections and piece together for a final copy.