I had just finished editing a podcast, I had saved the the file normally. What I wanted to do was compress the entire project in a zip format to send to someone else to do additional editing and instead of doing it normally I saw the “save compressed copy of project” option and thinking it was the same thing I pressed that. A bit into the save I decided I didn’t want to do that so I stopped it, I don’t remember if I pressed stop or close, but then the entire window went white so I had to force close the program. When I reopened the program a new dialog box showed up, which I have added as an attachment, and half of the audio from one of the tracks was missing. Is there anyway to recover that audio? I have looked in the temporary files on my computer and it seems to be empty. When I go into the data folder the only thing that seems to be there are the two audio files from the new save (so the one completed one and the one half audio) and the deleted audio from me originally editing the track. I still have the original audio file that is completely unedited.
I still have the original audio file that is completely unedited.
Gold Star.
Is that a WAV file?
That may be the only copy of your show. I’d probably put a copy of that on an external drive/thumb drive for extra safekeeping.
I think catching Audacity mid stroke like that was not a good thing. Someone will correct me, but I think what you have is as far as Audacity got before you pulled the plug. If you don’t also have a WAV of the edited show, make strong coffee and re-edit.
Too many producers lose the original shoot files and have to shoot it all again. That’s pretty painful.
We’ll see what the other elves have to say.
Koz
So I am guessing you saw no Automatic Crash Recovery dialogue, like this:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/m/images/c/c4/crashrecovery.png ?
And you initiated the save of the compressed copy of the project to the same name as the original AUP file? If so, Audacity should not let you do that, because that will be bound to create orphan files when you reopen the compressed project.
This happens because when Audacity saves the compressed project and creates the lossy OGG files for each track, it removes the references in the AUP file to the project’s audio. It leaves only an instruction to import the lossy OGG files next time it opens the project. When it opens the project, it decompresses the OGG files to new AU files (of course, slightly lossy compared to the original data) then sees the original data as orphan files because they are not listed in the AUP file.
If that is what you did it may have been better to let the saving as a compressed file complete and accept you degraded your original audio.
We can say I think that the orphans are some or all of your lossless original audio (I don’t think stopping or cancelling the compressed save would delete the original audio, but I have not tested that). However you can’t use that original audio data because the AUP file saving (at least started to) remove references to that data - hence you have no way to know how to piece together those orphan files that are the missing half of one track.
Gale