I am desperate to recover an audacity project i have been making for work during past two weeks. Now when i opened this original project, which has worked fine so far, the project and its various audio files just all show they have no sound in them. I already managed to save it as mp3, so not everything is lost, but actually i lost all my working hours, as now i cannot come back to edit its different audio layers anymore. They all just show up as there would not be any sound at all.
I would need the project file to copy+ paste the sound effects etc. when making the similar file in another language and also for future edits of this version.
Audacity complained about orphan files, but i have not moved any files from the project folder.
Is there any simple way i can get the final version of my project back?
Perhaps a very silly question, but very grateful for help if anyone has experienced this with their project.
I have used audacity for a couple of years, but nothing like this has ever happened.
If you haven’t closed Audacity, you can Edit > UNDO and Audacity should step back through your edits. If you closed Audacity, it clears out the UNDO system.
Are you running out of room on your computer?
Are you using External, Network, or Cloud Drives? Cloud drives aren’t stable enough for sound production and can cause very serious project damage.
orphan files, but i have not moved any files from the project folder.
Orphan files can happen when Audacity can’t identify or use existing files.
So that means you are using an earlier Audacity such as 2.4.2?
I already managed to save it as mp3, so not everything is lost
It’s highly recommended that you save perfect quality WAV sound files of all original recordings or other work. That way you can edit the show again if you have to with the only damage being the time spent.
If you’re editing an original live recording directly into a final production, any damage to the Project might kill the show. That kind of damage puts you all the way back to recording the work again.
The newer Audacity 3 series doesn’t save Projects like that any more. There were too many forever crashes with the older system.
Thank you both for useful information! I still did not manage to get the project back, but at least will updated to newer version of audacity to prevent this from happening again.