Hello
I’m PROBABLY using the second most recent version of audaicty, installed from the exe downloader around xmas this year, and I was using it on an old laptop with vista .
I’m not sure because my laptop has died the death (broken plasma screen and start up problems)
I have lost a set of mp3s making up an album which I have been working on, literally, for twenty years.
Does anyone anywhere (outside of the military industrial complex) keep a mirror or a dump of people’s files where I could possibly retrieve the wav’s I exported?
I know this is a really forlorn hope but outside of asking microsoft the same question, which I have done, I am out of other possibilities
Thanks for your time
Mike
Take the laptop to a data recovery service?
drivesavers.com or one of the many, many other services.
Also, you should not “work” in mp3. You have to decompress each and every time you work on it and recompress afterwards. Every time, you loose some minute part of the music. Do it often enough and nothing is left.
BTW, congrats with the time machine 
Christmas isn’t here yet and I’ve not seen a laptop with a plasma screen in over twenty years. 
If you have access to another computer such as at a public library or internet café you could download a Linux live operating system to a USB drive then see if you can boot your computer from the USB drive. The Linux system should be able to see the files on Windows and you could copy them to another USB drive, assuming you have more than one USB port.
Or buy for example an Ubuntu CD from https://www.osdisc.com/. You can “try” Ubuntu to run it live, without installing it.
Gale
'If you have access to another computer such as at a public library or internet café you could download a Linux live operating system to a USB drive then see if you can boot your computer from the USB drive. The Linux system should be able to see the files on Windows and you could copy them to another USB drive, assuming you have more than one USB port. ’
Gale Andrews thanks for trying to help so far. Could you talk me through what you just said as though I were a five year old with brain damage when you get a moment please?
Or suggest somewhere I could read a walk through?
I’ve go an easier solution (assuming the old hard drive is readable).
You can get a little [u]USB Drive Adapter Kit[/u]. It comes with a power supply and some cables so you can plug it into your new computer and copy the files.
You will have to remove the hard drive from your old computer, so if you’re not comfortable doing that it would be best to have it done by a computer repair shop.
…I’ve used it to read data off of drives “dead” computers and I’ve used it with cloning software to “clone” drives when I want to upgrade the drive or the operating system. I used it once when I wanted to upgrade to a bigger drive, and I just used it last weekend to make a new clone drive before upgrading my laptop to Windows 10. I installed the new clone and upgraded from that one so I could re-install the old drive with no changes in case anything went wrong… Nothing went wrong.
I thought perhaps you would not want to take the drive out of the old computer, but if you now have the new computer, try what Doug suggests.
If you are going to pay a computer shop to remove the drive, they might actually retrieve the data for you for not a great deal more money, especially if you only want a couple of files.
Gale