PLEASE HELP!!!

I’ve been searching everywhere on how to recover my project but no one else seems to have the same problem as me. I was editing my audio right before I was going to save it and I noticed it was acting up. I thought Audacity was going to crash and so I went to save it. Then for some reason it didn’t let me save my project I think it said something about it either not being writable or not having enough storage space. I checked my storage and I had more than enough so I tried just exporting it instead to see if that would work and then boom… Audacity force closed and prompted me with a message saying sorry for the inconvenience. I opened up Audacity crossing my fingers that I could recover it and when I clicked recover projects a warning poped up saying “Project check found file inconsistencies during automatic recovery”. I went under the help menu and clicked show log only to see this…

21:20:12: Audacity 2.1.3
21:20:12: Trying to load FFmpeg libraries…
21:20:12: Trying to load FFmpeg libraries from system paths. File name is ‘avformat-55.dll’.
21:20:12: Looking up PATH environment variable…
21:20:12: PATH = ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Intel\Shared Libraries\redist\intel64\compiler;C:\ProgramData\Oracle\Java\javapath;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0;C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Common;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\WINDOWS\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0;C:\Users\denni\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps;’
21:20:12: Checking that ‘’ is in PATH…
21:20:12: FFmpeg directory is in PATH.
21:20:12: Checking for monolithic avformat from ‘avformat-55.dll’.
21:20:12: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘avformat-55.dll’ (error 126: the specified module could not be found.)
21:20:12: Loading avutil from ‘’.
21:20:12: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘.dll’ (error 126: the specified module could not be found.)
21:20:12: Loading avcodec from ‘’.
21:20:12: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘.dll’ (error 126: the specified module could not be found.)
21:20:12: Loading avformat from ‘avformat-55.dll’.
21:20:12: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘avformat-55.dll’ (error 126: the specified module could not be found.)
21:20:12: Error: Failed to load FFmpeg libraries.
21:20:12: Error: Failed to find compatible FFmpeg libraries.
21:25:26: Warning: Orphan block file: ‘C:\Users\denni\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData\project15750\e00\d00\e0000005.au’
21:25:26: Warning: Orphan block file: ‘C:\Users\denni\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData\project15750\e00\d00\e0000006.au’

(there are a lot more orphan files here but they make this post have well over 300,000 characters and the most allowed on this thread is 60,000)

21:25:26: Warning: Orphan block file: ‘C:\Users\denni\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData\project15750\e00\d11\e0011f1c.au’
21:25:26: Warning: Orphan block file: ‘C:\Users\denni\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData\project15750\e00\d11\e0011f5d.au’
21:25:26: Warning: Project check ignored orphan block file(s). They will be deleted when project is saved.
21:25:26: Warning: Project check found file inconsistencies inspecting the loaded project data.


I have no clue what to do and can’t find any help anywhere…

Audacity 2.1.3 is very old. The current version is 2.2.2, which is available here: https://www.audacityteam.org/download/
Upgrading is highly recommended.

“Orphan blockfile” messages means that Audacity has found audio data that it thinks does not belong to the project.
“missing blockfiles” messages means that Audacity can’t find audio data that it thinks does belongs to the project.

Does Audacity 2.1.3 give you an option to “Continue without deleting…”?
If it does, chose that option. What you get when the project opens is what Audacity can recover of the project, and that is probably as good as it gets.
Play the project to see if it plays correctly - missing audio data is not always obvious because Audacity saves some of the graphical data separate from the audio data.
Save the project to a known good location and quit Audacity, using a new and unique file name.

If you are happy with the project that you have just saved, you can then relaunch Audacity and allow it to delete the orphan blockfiles. Note that once that audio data had been deleted, it can’t be recovered.

I don’t get any audio whatsoever when it “recovers” it… It’s just 27 minutes of blank