TL;DR: Ran into Missing Audio Data Block Files error without so much as looking at the directory the files stored in.
I’ve had something occur which I’m having difficulty making sense of and was wondering if anyone has encountered something like this or if I’m a new breed of unlucky.
Currently I’m running Ubuntu 18.04 and editing a handful of audio files within one project (3 currently) which are ~3.5 hours long. I did some editing (Noise reduction/compression), then left it alone. I came back to it the next day, did some more editing (deleting of some audio in a track, moving stuff around) and left it alone. Few days later I came back to it and did some more editing and low and behold I get the “Missing Audio Data Block Files” dialogue with the normal three options.
I haven’t moved or even touched the files and folders aside from saving the project. So I started a new project and did some editing when suddenly -all- of the audio in the project was gone. I’m talking flat lines across all three tracks. So I saved and reopened it to get another error of the same type.
At this point I was concerned for my SSD so I ran some diagnostics and didn’t find any issues with my SSD.
I’m a bit stumped. Has anyone encountered something like this before? I can post logfiles if they still exist later. I’m just stuck at work at the moment. The only thing I can think of is that something went weird when my system went into hibernation mode a few times.
Little bit of an update: I came home from work, opened up a project , cut some audio, moved the track a bit to test things and saved it.
Opened it up to a new error and some log entries. (The logs don’t seem to want to save anywhere so I’ll have to type some stuff manually)
“Warning Gap detected in project file.
Start (1237820) for block file (replaced with silence) is not one sample past end of previous block (1310720).
Moving start so blocks are contiguous”
repeated an indeterminate number of times with new block numbers.
I then made three new projects with different file formats being used for the audio (mp3, m4a, wav), cut some audio and moved things around and haven’t been able to replicate the error
There’s a bug in Audacity 2.2.1 that you need to be aware of:
If you overwrite a project using “Save Project As…” (rather than the normal “Save Project…”), it can cause data loss.
This bug has been fixed and is not present in later versions of Audacity, but in Audacity 2.2.1, if you want to save changes to a project without changing the name of the project (updating the project), then take care to ensure that you use “Save Project” and NOT “Save Project As”.
I am having the exact same issue. I didn’t re-name anything, saved the file I was editing (not save as), and not I have missing audio data block files. the question of course, is now how do I take all of the 6 second snippets I have from a three track-stereo, 2 hour recording and try to piece it all back together again? I can’t quite figure out the naming convention in the data folder, so trying to go through and listen to six second snippets to piece together is…in a word…ludicrous.
Any help or suggestions someone has on how to salvage any part of this would be much appreciated.
It’s partially random. Attempting to piece together a 2 hour show will take forever.
Audacity needs the project’s “.aup” file. It’s not optional. If there’s no “.aup” file, then you don’t have a recoverable project.