I can't believe I messed up this horribly

Audacity Help Forum Windows
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Hello

I am in a project with four other people; we record each week. This week, for scheduling reasons, we decided to make 2 recordings to free up time for other plans; rescheduling is not feasible, I won’t burden you with why.

Anyway, our first recording went beautifully. Unfortunately, after finishing our second recording, I found that my track could not be found. I did “sync” with everybody in the beginning of the second recording, but when he had finished (and were getting ready to save), I saw that I literally had nothing to save. Maybe I had multiple screens open and x’d out Audacity by mistake? I just kept chattering away with the rest of the team, blissfully unaware that my voice wasn’t being recorded. Now we have records of 5-person conversations that have 1 of the 5 people completely missing (at least, for part of the recording).

It appears that there’s really no way to fix this. I could record a new track on my own, trying to make it fit, I suppose, but our editor (who participates in the discussions) would have to finish his normal editing job first, which takes him many hours. I don’t see how we could possibly have time.

Has anyone else out there ever had any experience with this kind of nightmare? Any suggestions?

Thank You

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I won’t burden you with why.

Go ahead and burden us. We have to construct your performance in our heads to figure out what’s wrong and seemingly trivial details can sometimes be valuable.

On first pass, I envisioned y’all sitting around a table in the kitchen. In fact you were probably in completely different cities, right? Each performer records their own voice and ships the sound files to you (or the editor) for integration into one show. Stop me if I miss anything.

Your particular recording just stopped dead for no apparent reason. Can I assume you don’t keep one quarter of one eye on the Audacity bouncing sound meters during the show? You are the recording engineer…or one fifth of one.

What’s the possibility you stopped the recording before the second segment?

It appears that there’s really no way to fix this.

There is no button to resurrect a recording that didn’t get made.

I could record a new track on my own, trying to make it fit, I suppose

I suppose, too. Actually, you win big time. If one of the other performers were missing, the show would be trash, full stop. You at least have a way out, awkward though it may be.

You could set up for overdubbing and play the other voices while you record your own voice—all in real time. I predict you will remember a lot more of the performance than you think.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_multi_track_overdubs.html

This is very Hollywood, by the way. I can give you addresses of the studios that do this. All of the dialog doesn’t always come out perfect on every shoot.

Koz

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There is a high point. If you pull this off, you will be the Experienced Professional.

Koz