(I wasn’t sure if this should go here or on the feedback forum, but the feedback forum said bug reports should go here, so…)
This post is related to a request for help I sent out a couple days ago (https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/urgent-file-recovery-help/54656/1). Though I’ve all but given up on recovering that project, I have done some investigating into the problem and would like to report what I’ve found. Hopefully it will help prevent problems in the future if this really is a bug. I have not ruled out failure on my end due to hard drive error, etc. Again, I know little about computers. These are just observations I’ve made.
So, first of all, I have only had Audacity since August, so I have always used version 2.3.3 (I forgot to mention this in my help post). The whole problem began when Audacity crashed while I was trying to apply the equalizer. It looked just like this: https://youtu.be/rZIXWl5Nldw, which was posted by a 2.3.2 user in January.
In summary, I tried auto-recovering a project that I’d saved not long before the crash. There was no audio. The AUP file (which I’ve attached and will refer to as “Magnet”), however, seems completely normal. This is supported by the fact that all the audio lengths, track dividers, envelopings, and track size, and solo/mute settings were supported. It’s easy to then deduce that the problem lies in the audio data, not the AUP. I attached a photo of the project’s e08 folder, but it looks normal. Even the sizes of the “d” folders look okay.
I opened every AU file from each of the “d” folders, but only for most of them, all of the AU files played no audio. I’ve attached two examples of the silent AUs. Quite a few of them were over 1 MB in size.
Only in the d02 folder did I find that most of the files over 719 KB had sound (only 4 files larger than 719 KB were silent). I put them all on a new Audacity project. They all seem to have been from one channel, and many overlapped. From Magnet’s AUP instructions in Notepad, I found that all of the AU files listed in the AUP were silent. In addition, I counted 51 files with audio. None of them were on the AUP. Yesterday, when I’d tried to open my project, Audacity had warned me about 51 orphan block files. There’s a photo of that on my help post, since I can’t attach more files to this one.
It seems like I’m not the only one whose AU files had gone corrupt. I’m now worried that my current data from other saved projects could suddenly be wiped blank too.
Thanks for reading!
e080a9e3.au (121 KB)
e080a02c.au (1.02 MB)
Magnet.aup (146 KB)