Hello, last night I had made a 4 hour recording and then put my computer to sleep. When I went back on the computer I noticed that Audacity had crashed and I was pleased to see that there was a recovery option. However, when I chose to recover the latest project I was given this message; Re: Error: Not well-formed (invalid token) at line 6085.
This was a very important recording and if someone can help me to recover it, I would be eternally grateful.
If you have an irreplaceable recording it is better to save an Audacity project (or better yet export a WAV file) as soon as recording completes.
I don’t see anything wrong with line 6085 so I have applied the standard solution to your file - remove the line before last which is just NUL’s and a duplicate tag. Try the attached.
Hello Gale,
I appreciate your help! I downloaded the file and put it into the autosave folder on my hard drive. However, after recovering it there was a message that pops up that says that there were “file inconsistencies”. I then saved it as a WAV file and when I tried to listen to it there is only silence. I am not sure why or what to do but I thank you for your effort in trying to help me.
Either Audacity can’t access the C:UsersFXAppDataLocalTempaudacity_tempproject23736 folder, or the files and folders within it have been rearranged or renamed by the crash.
If you are not FX, log in as FX or log in as admin.
To let us see if “C:UsersFXAppDataLocalTempaudacity_tempproject23736” has the correct structure, please post a listing of the files and folders it contains.
Navigate in Explorer to “C:UsersFXAppDataLocalTempaudacity_temp” then open “audacity_temp” so that you can see the folder “project23736” inside it.
Hold SHIFT on your computer keyboard then right-click over the “project23736” folder.
In the menu that appears, click on “Open command window here”.
In the command prompt, type:
dir /s /o:d > listing.txt
Once the command is complete, a file called “listing.txt” will appear in the “project23736” folder. It should list all the files and folders that are in the “project23736” folder, in date order.
Alternatively you can try recovering the AU files that are in the various “d” folders in “project23736” to new WAV files. The principle is to gather about 1000 of the AU files (from the first four “d” folders d00 to d03), sort the AU files by time, rename them while time sorted to have a continuous naming sequence, then use the 1.2 Recovery Utility to create a WAV file from those 1000 or so AU files.
Hi Gale,
Thank you once again for your assistance. I did what you said and have attached the listing.txt file. This is all very interesting and I am learning a lot.
To me the structure looks perfect - the expected number of AU files in the correct folders in the correct place.
What doesn’t look correct is the timestamps on the files, which are all within three minutes of each other (25 June 06:44 to 06:47 PM). Was that when you woke up or went to sleep? Near identical timestamps will rule out recovering the files with the 1.2 Recovery Utility.
Did you edit the recording before putting the computer to sleep? Was it only Audacity that crashed or the computer that crashed? Or did the computer run out of battery?
If the computer ran out of battery, then it would probably save your work to hiberfil.sys (the hibernate file) and would probably restore from there, which might account for the timestamps.
The other concern is the size of the AU files - they appear to be half the size they should be (about 500 kb instead of about 1 MB which they should be for a 32-bit project. Can you attach three of the AU files?
Hi Gale,
This was all on June 23rd, so I am not sure why it says June 25th. Also, I put the computer to sleep and then when I opened it back up everything had crashed, my browser and every other application that was running. Fortunately, this doesn’t really ever happen. I will try to attach 3 of the .au files if I can. Does it matter which ones?
Hi Gale,
I am not sure where to look for these .au files? Also, I have restarted my computer and I am afraid that the temporary files may be gone. This was an important recording but I am afraid it may be lost. However, I have learned a lot about how Audacity works. I need to think about this in case this happens again in the future.
They are in the 13 “d” folders (“d00” to “d0c”) in “C:UsersFXAppDataLocalTempaudacity_tempproject23736e00”.
Do you mean it restarted itself for example due to a Windows update? If so the temp folder contents are probably still there because Audacity did not shut down properly.
If you initiated the restart and went back to Audacity to quit it, either saving changes or not, the temp folder contents will be deleted by Audacity - as I said. If you force-quit Audacity in Task Manager, the temp folder contents should be retained.
Did you make a copy of the temp folder?
If not, then you are only left with file recovery software like Pandora . There is no guarantee you will get all the files back that way. If you attempt it, save the recovered files to a different drive than C: (such as an external drive).
Fundamentally, export the recording as one or more WAV files immediately after recording finishes (the “safe” maximum for WAV files that all applications will be able to play is 2 GB, meaning 3 hours 20 minutes for a 16-bit 44100 Hz stereo WAV).
I assume the computer either ran out of battery, or it crashed for some reason but you were using “hybrid sleep” which saves the operating system session to both RAM and hiberfil.sys. A crash during standard sleep would probably have caused you to either lose the temp data or if it survived, it would not have had its timestamps modified.
I don’t understand the smaller than expected AU files but I suspect that is the cause of the silenced tracks. I suppose I should test what happens if temp data is recovered from hiberfil.sys (if that is what happened).
You can always look at the Event Logs and Memory Dump to find out more about what actually happened.
Wait, I think I might have the AU files you mentioned. Although the recording was silent I saved it as an AU file and there is a “data folder” stored along with the shortcut. So which folder did you want the AU folders from? d00, d0a, d0b, etc?
Sorry, but that’s exactly what I told you not to do.
If it was essential to reboot, you should have force quit Audacity to preserve the temporary data.
What the project save did was to write silence for the AU files, because that is what the project contains, then it moves the AU files from the temp folder to the _data folder for the project.
I don’t know if Audacity will be able to open that saved project or if it will make the AU files the expected 1 MB each, but if so the project will be silence.
I don’t think file recovery software will help you with that. Assuming from your screenshot that you are on Windows 8 or 8.1, and have File History enabled, you might have copies of the AU files if File History backs up files that are in “Recent Places” within “Favorites”. I have not used that feature so I am not sure.
Okay, well now I am having another problem with another very important recording. This time I actually saved it as an .AU file and for some reason when I try to open it Audacity opens up but then freezes… I am not sure why.
At 44100 Hz project rate which you used for the recording you lost, you can save up to about 13.5 hours in one track, but if you use higher project rates the length limit is proportionally less. This limitation will be removed in the next 2.0.6 release.
If the recordings are mono, 44100 Hz and under 6 hours 40 minutes, I would suggest exporting as WAV (Microsoft) signed 16-bit PCM rather than save a project. This will give you a WAV file up to 2 GB in size that any application will be able to play. If you want to edit the recording, just import the WAV into Audacity.
If new issues arise that are not to do with the recording you lost, please start a new topic.
