Crash!

If anyone can help me I will be extremely grateful!

A friend and I have done a podcast recording that is two an a half hours long, an the first time, the sound quality was irrepairably bad. So we have re-recorded, an when I went to save the file, Audacity crashed and I lost it.

But not completely.

I used the recovery utility and got the files back, but when I listen to them, they seem to be incomplete, like they are parts of seconds missing between the seconds, so the conversation does not make sense. This is especially important as well, because it has to sync up with my friend’s half.

Does anyone know of how I might save myself having to do a two an half hour recording for a third time?

the sound quality was irrepairably bad.

What was wrong with it?

when I went to save the file, Audacity crashed

Do you know why?

Which version of Audacity and which Windows?

Those may all be related. If your hard drive is full, damaged or highly fragmented, it will cause audacity to crash and may scatter or damage your capture clips. You can try crash recovery, but the older your Audacity is, the less likely you are to recover anything valuable.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_opening_and_saving_files.html#crashed

Two and a half hours of stereo, high quality show can be as large as 2GB. Can you stand 4GB of 5GB on your machine and still have elbow room? Did you use plain filenames? Never put punctuation marks or other odd characters inside a filename, the system could become unstable.

Koz

Are any of your older shows available? Post the URL.
Koz

The first time was a problem with the microphone.

The second time I do not know why the system crashed, it just did. There is still plenty of room on the hard drive, so that should not be an issue.

My friend an I were recording commentary for a video that was playing a match of a game that he was in (the finals). I will post the URL when we get it done. But we o have a podcast (that we have not one in a while) but it is called “Monster Island”, and can be found here:

http://wapcaplets.podbean.com/2011/05/07/monster-island-episode-1-the-beginning/

The Audacity version is 1.2.6

That’s obsolete and probably the cause of your problems - the 1.2.x series pre-dates Vista.
The current version is 2.0.2 http://audacityteam.org/download/

Fair enough, I will update to avoid future problems. But any advice on recovering a cleaner copy of my crashed data?

Not really.

If this was a stereo recording you must choose 2 channels in the recovery utility.

If you had edited the files, the order they are recovered in will probably not be correct and you may get too much audio including the parts before you edited them.

If the recovery utility produced more than one recovery file per channel and you had not done any editing, it is possible there are missing AU files somewhere that would make a complete alphanumerical sequence of AU files. These could possibly be deleted but still recoverable with file recovery software. There is only a small chance this would solve the problem. If the drive is very full, any deleted AU files would soon be overwritten.


Gale