Can't save or export audacity files

Hi. I just recorded a half hour long file that I really don’t want to redo. When I stopped recording I got this message:

I run Audacity 1.2.6, and had no idea there was a new version at all before today. I hope someone can help. Thanks.

The system can not find …

Can you find it? If you drill down to that same directory manually in Windows can you get there? You can get problems like that if you try to save a project or export a file with punctuation marks in the filename.

Yes, Audacity 1.2.6 is seriously out of date.

Koz

Nope. Is it because I recorded 2 recordings and didn’t export/save one before doing the other?

What was the exact chain of events leading up to the problem?
Where is “b00357.au” ?
Did some files get deleted somehow?

We can’t really tell what went wrong without knowing the exact steps to create the problem, but Audacity 2.0.2 has much better management of project files than the old 1.2.6 version.

I recorded one voice track that was about 13 minutes long, stopped that recording and left it open. I started another voice track, this one lasting about half an hour. When I stopped that one, and went to export it, almost all of the audio was gone, it gave me that error, and the files it was specifying are nowhere to be found. Same thing with the 13 minute track, except ALL of that is gone.

Audacity 1.2.6 was never stable on Vista or Windows 7.
I don’t recall you saying which version of Windows you use, but the pictures look like Vista or 7.
One of the documented problems with Audacity 1.2.6 on Vista/Win 7 was the program crashing when the stop button was pressed. It looks like in your case Audacity did not crash, but wiped out most of the project data. (I’m only guessing here because I don’t use Windows and Audacity 1.2.6 is so obsolete that I don’t remember all of its quirks. To be fair, it was not really the fault of the Audacity developers - Vista and Win 7 did not exist when the 1.2.x series was written.

Audacity 2.0.2 is available here: http://audacityteam.org/download/

Did you possibly run out of disk space at some point? Clearly Explorer doesn’t see the AU file in the message, but you could search your computer for it just in case - if you find it, you may find the other files.

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Gale