Ubuntu. In the past I had a bunch of audio wav files recorded on Audacity, but after checking them recently I see they have all been changed to lots of tiny 1mg au files under a Home file called boot data. How do I retrieve them?
The .AU files are data files for an Audacity project.
An Audacity project is NOT an audio file. There are two parts to an Audacity project, a “.AUP” project file, and a “_data” folder. Both parts are essential. The “_data” folder contains the audio data (the “.AU” files), and the “.AUP” file tells Audacity how to reassemble the data files to create the project.
To open an Audacity project, double click on the “.AUP” file, or select the “.AUP” file from Audacity’s “File menu > Open Project”.
To get an ordinary audio file that can play in other apps, “Export” the audio.
See also: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/audacity_projects.html
Ok thanks for that. Can all of these music files be recovered?
Only if you still have the .AUP file (or an exported normal audio file).
Can all of these music files be recovered?
You can play all the little 6-second sound files, yes, but the AUP file contains the instructions for putting them back together into a show. Sometimes it may be possible to use the file time and date stamps and a lot of luck to put the shows back together, but if it’s an edited show, that’s the end of the world.
That’s an Audacity Project.
This process was awkward enough that the next version of Audacity will do Projects a different way.
Koz
Damn. It looks that’s it then. Thanks.
Just discovered an Audacity Recovery Utility. Has anyone used it. Was it successful in recovering corrupted au files?
The “Audacity Recovery Utility” will only work with .AU that are still in Audacity’s “temp” directory, as is the case if Audacity crashes during a recording (hardly ever happens these days). Once the project has been save, the recovery utility will no longer be useful because the time-stamp for the .AU files no longer relates to the time that it was recorded (the time stamp is now the time that the project was saved).
Audacity Recovery Utility.
Did you get that from the Audacity help pages? A Utility was offered for a while but its hit rate was so bad that it was deprecated.
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recovery.html
The later Audacity programs would sense there was something wrong and try to fix it, but the track record wasn’t very good. Sometimes the best they could do was “Yes. It’s broken.”
Koz