How to retrieved deleted part in a saved project?

Special Interest Groups Recording Techniques
1

Hello all!

This is my first post, so forgive me if I don’t know all of the etiquette… I’ll learn!

I’ve recorded for a friend the answering machine annoncement & messages of his recently deceased mother.

I recorded in Audacity using an external card and microphone and quality was quite good.

Somehow, I saved the project after deleting his mother’s voice on the annoncement, keeping only the incoming messages.

I have already exported mp3 versions of the messages only, but my friend really wish to have his mother’s voice as well, so I’m trying to find a way to get back to the original data before I deleted the annoncement part.

When I open the project saved I can’t acces the redo, undo buttons (they’re greyed out).
What Can I DO ? Thanks anybody Steph

2

Sorry to say that when you close an Audacity project, the “undo” files are deleted.

If you are on a Windows computer there is an extremely slim possibility that you may be able to recover some of the deleted data by using a file recovery program (such as Norton Unerase) to recover the old “.au” files (the old data files). Any old files recovered may contain fragments of the lost data. Any deleted files that have since been overwritten are gone and lost forever. Even if you are able to recover the old .au files, you will have a huge problem determining which fragments belong with which project and which order they belong in. All things considered, the chances of recovering any meaningful amount of the deleted data are virtually nil.

I presume that the original answering machine message is no longer available?

3

Thanks Steve,

you guessed right: the phone service got disconnected so everything has been wiped!

I was somewhat hopefull, cause I had read somewhere that even when a project had been saved it would still be possible to recuperate deleted parts.

I tought the program was only editing in front copied files without touching the original recording.

MMMMhh?

Steph

4

If you open / import a file called “original.wav” (for example), edit it and save it as “newfile.wav”, then the file “original.wav” will still exist and will effectively be “untouched”. However, if you open / import a file “original.wav”, and edit it,and then export it as “original.wav”, you have then told Audacity to overwrite the original file, and it will.