I recorded 3.5 hours of audio and then saved the file. Once Done I noticed I had named the project wrong, so I closed the project and went to rename the file manually. Once done I re-opened the project to see the audio was removed from the track, however it still showed the track being 3.5 hours long. I have tried for hours to recover the audio and nothing has helped.
This audio is irreplaceable and I would greatly appreciate it if someone was able to tell me how to recover it.
You can only rename the show from inside Audacity. Renaming files manually was a very bad idea.
Can you put the original names of the files and folders back? If you don’t remember what they were, open the AUP file in a text editor program and the name of the original show should be in the first line of text or so.
http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/aup1.jpg
If you started to scramble filenames with additional projects, pull the two original files into their own folder, rename them back to normal and then open the AUP file in Audacity. The AUP file and the _DATA folder of the same name are required to be in the same folder for the show to open.
Koz
I renamed the AUP file and the _DATA folder back to their original names and moved them to their own folder, however I am still having the same problem. The Audio is still not appearing in the track and I am receiving an error message upon start-up saying I have orphan block files in the _DATA folder.
I am on Windows 7 and am using Audacity v 2.0.5 if this information helps
I am still searching on forums and seeing if other people have experienced the same problems I was having. I have successfully installed FFmpeg, but there are still just over 10,000 orphan block files.
Any and all help is appreciated
I recorded 3.5 hours of audio and then saved the file.
Did you play any of it before you saved it? What was the work? What were you recording? Did you have bouncing lights in the sound meters and blue waves during the whole show? What was wrong with the original name?
Once done I re-opened the project
Did you change both the AUP filename and the _DATA folder name? Right there you’re on very slippery ground. If you only changed the AUP filename, you should have been able to open and make one change to the show, and then the show would not open after that. You can get the original show back by changing everything back the way it was.
Or at least I could. Orphan blocks is pretty serious, particularly since your show seems to have experienced a digital firestorm.
I’m out of ideas. I think the filename change is a smokescreen and your original show was damaged.
Koz
I did not play any of it before I saved it and I had the blue waves and sound meters the entire time I was recording. I was recording me and my brother talking over gameplay footage. I called the project Audio 2 but what are you talking about bouncing lights?
I only changed the AUP filename and then changed it back when it did not open. Once I changed the name the blue waves were gone but the track was still there with the correct amount of time we recorded for.
Also I don’t know if this matters but I recorded it in the highest hz/sec on the dropdown menu in audacity, which is 384000 hz/sec. It took a long time to save but I just wanted to mention it in case it has something to do with this.
but what are you talking about bouncing lights?
The sound meters.
That high a quality and that long a show can be dangerous. Did you outrun the space on your hard drive?
Let’s see, put down the five, carry the one…
I get about 10GB as a WAV file (which is too big for WAV) but an Audacity Project at 32-floating would have been far higher than that.
Koz
I did not run out of space and I am sure of that as I record to an external hard drive which has 750 gb of space.
Also I went into the _DATA folder and order the files using xploere^2 and mass renamed the files e$000001.au in order to organize them but it does not seem to have helped. This was a few hours before you contacted me and I’m not exactly sure what it accomplished.
That’s the rescue process if you lost your AUP project manager file. It doesn’t help orphan blocks at all.
10,000 orphan blocks is profound data damage. You have a 750GB drive. So do I, but I’m still running out of space on one of them. How much space do you have left and how is it connected?
I lost a USB cable a while back and it created all sorts of damage until I found it and replaced it.
Do older shows open and play OK?
I got nothing. I don’t know what you could do to Audacity to cause that much damage.
Koz
This addresses an orphan block problem near the end.
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/lost-project-file/33392/6
Koz
That setting is way over the top for audio recording. I’d recommend that you use the default 44100 Hz sample rate.
Very high sample rates pose a number of problems. It is much more demanding on the computer because there is much more data to move around. Also, there are some important size limits.
The size limit for WAV files is 4 GB, which is about 6.8 hours for stereo 44100 Hz, about 1.5 hours for mono 384000 Hz, or just under 47 minutes hours for stereo 384000 Hz. WAV - Wikipedia
There is also a size limit for projects in Audacity 2.x which is a maximum length of around 13.5 hours for 44100 Hz or 1.5 hours at 384000 Hz. Missing features - Audacity Support Once saved, projects larger than this will fail to open again. This is (mostly) fixed in the next Audacity release, but you should still be using a more sensible sample rate such as 44100 Hz.
You may be able to recover at least some of the data using manual recovery methods as described here: Missing features - Audacity Support but not guaranteed.
As no-one said it yet, the way to rename a project inside Audacity is File > Save Project As… . The project with the old name closes as it was last saved, and you are left with the project with the new name.
From what you say, it seems that Audacity can now find the _data folder, and the orphan block files are presumably caused by recording at an excessive project rate. The renaming to a continuous alphanumeric sequence in xplorer2 (after sorting the files by time) is so that you can then use the 1.2 Recovery Utility to recover the files. You should not recover more than about 1 GB of files at a time because the 1.2 Recovery Utility will have overflow errors. That means no more than four “d” folders at a time.
However if you have a backup of the _data folder before you renamed the files, you should try to open the project in 2.0.6-alpha first (the version at the top of this list: http://gaclrecords.org.uk/win-nightly/ ). That version can (largely) cope with 2^31 samples or more in a track.
Gale
I have already used the mass renaming tool to sort the AU files within the d folders. I have just used the recovery tool on the first d folder and this is what it gave me. This is supposed to be me and my brother talking, instead it sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi movie.
If this means anything please let me know.
*note - this is only one block as I wanted the upload time to be quick
I also tried to use the latest version of Audacity to open the AUD file, but I was unable to open it application due to something in the temp folder.
Also I will be sure to record at the standard 44100 hz/sec to limit the file size from now on.
*Note - I wanted to upload the wav file for you to listen to, but the forum is not allowing me to do so
As it says at Missing features - Audacity Support, you will need to use the Track Drop-Down Menu to Set Rate to the rate the project had, 384000 Hz in this case.
Note that if this is a stereo recording, some left-channel blocks may be in the right-hand channel in the recovered file (and vice-versa).
Note that it’s the AUP project file you are trying to open.
To open that project you would need to open the original project data before you renamed its files.
If you were opening the original data, let us know what the error says exactly. You can use ALT + PrtScr to capture an image, then paste into Paint and save as a PNG file.
To attach PNG or AU files (maximum 1 MB per file) please see: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-attach-files-to-forum-posts/24026/1 .
Gale
Here is a screenshot of the log when I attempt to open the AUD file.
Thanks but that result is expected. The _data folder has the renamed AU files, which are not listed in the AUP file, hence they are noted as orphans.
If there were no other problems with that project, 2.0.6-alpha “should” have opened it without you doing all the sorting and renaming. It makes sense to try 2.0.6-alpha first.
So do you now have the project recovered more or less correctly using the recovery WAV files from the 1.2 Recovery Utility?
Gale
The only audio I was able to recover was the sci-fi sounding wav file.
Also When I attempted to open the latest version of audacity 2.0.6 there was a pop up saying there was a problem with something in the temp folder. I would try to open the AUD file in the newest version if I could but it refuses to open.
You mean one WAV file that was recovered from just four of the “d” folders?
Was the problem that the WAV sounded too slow? If so, did you use Set Rate > 384000 Hz in the Track Drop-Down Menu as suggested?
There is no such thing as an Audacity AUD file. The Audacity project file has AUP extension.
As previously explained, the project’s AUP file will not open correctly once you have renamed the AU files in the “d” folders (because the AU files listed in the AUP file still have their original names).
If you had a backup of the original _data folder you could open the AUP file in 2.0.6-alpha using that folder.
There is a way to recreate the AUP file from the new names of the AU files. But you don’t need that if you already made recovery WAV files for each group of “d” folders.
Gale
How do I make the audio recovery process 384000 Hz? I ask this because when I run the recovery process one d folder gives me 24 minutes of audio, which is crazy because I have around 40 d folders in the _data folder.
2.0.6-alpha
Audacity 2.0.6 is not the latest version. Alpha software is a program in thinking stages where the developers throw around ideas and see how the different, newly-written portions of the program interact with each other. Nobody is expecting it all to work right. 2.0.6-alpha has to go through beta version, beta testing with many different users and then final polishing and a release product, very probably months away.
As I understand it, 2.0.6-alpha has newly written recovery tools and this is the last ditch, desperation method to try and put your show back together again.
If these last few steps fail, then there is no show to recover.
Koz
Was the problem that the WAV sounded too slow?
You can’t make the recovery work in 384000 Hz. The recovery WAV will be 44100 Hz so it will be much longer than the original audio. To fix that, as already suggested, use the Track Drop-Down Menu (click in the Track Name, then choose “Set Rate”, then choose 384000 Hz).
If your project was stereo 16-bit, 384000 Hz then one “d” folder contains a little less than 3 minutes of audio.
When you import the recovery WAV files for that single folder, they will be at 44100 Hz (one recovery WAV per channel). A rate of 44100 Hz is over eight times lower than 384000 Hz, so it would be correct if the recovery WAV was set at the wrong rate of 44100 Hz that it would be about 24 minutes long.
When you set rate to 384000 Hz (as described above) then the audio will be the correct length of a little less than 3 minutes.
40 “d” folders would be less than 2 hours of stereo audio but you said you recorded 3.5 hours. Was
the recording mono or stereo, 16-bit or 32-bit? If the recording was mono 16-bit then a complete “d” folder would contain a little less than 6 minutes of audio which would appear as about 48 minutes if the recovery WAV was set to 44100 Hz in Audacity.
Are you saying that you only sorted and renamed one of the folders? If so then you have recovered only three minutes of a stereo project.
Gale