So I just finished a project I had been working on, and now I had been saving constantly throughout. I was about to save again, when suddenly windows gave me a “watchdog” blue screen of death and restarted. When the computer came back on, my file won’t open anymore. Instead, it just says that it’s a Audacity Project file and to use file open to open it. However, even when I do that, the same thing happens. I looked at it in notepad and it’s completely blank…but there is a folder full of data from it organized with a letter followed by a number. Is there ANYTHING I can do to fix this?
Without the AUP file the project will be unrecoverable.
Re. the system crash, I’d suggest that you check your computer manufacturers website to see if updated drivers are available. Watchdog Violation errors shouldn’t occur these days.
Even though I saved it a bunch of times before then? There will be no record of any of the files? The .aup is there, but just blank in notepad…is that what you mean by it being gone? Thanks for your help.
I have the data folder with all the pieces in it. I don’t know if that’s helpful.
Typically there are thousands of pieces of audio data. The AUP file tells Audacity how to put the pieces together. If the AUP file is empty then you would need to look / listen to each piece and work out where it should go - like doing a giant audio jigsaw puzzle. For very small projects it may be practical to do that, but for anything more than about a minute duration the task of manually putting the pieces together becomes unrealistically difficult. For a project that has been “worked on” (edited or processed), some of the pieces will belong to the “Undo History” and not belong in the final state of the project - in other words, you not only have an audio jigsaw puzzle, you also have thousands of extra pieces that are not part of the finished picture.