While recording a podcast on Audacity 2.4.2 on a Windows 10 laptop the recording didn’t save at the end. When clicking stop, Audacity crashed, when reopened I had an error about Orphan Blocks, which appear to be the totality of my recording. Is there a way to recover this recording? It was a fairly difficult multi-lingual podcast and I know it’s going to be hard to get people rescheduled to re-record. Here is the log, minus the extra 1400+ Orphan block file items
07:37:42: Audacity 2.4.2
07:37:42: Trying to load FFmpeg libraries…
07:37:42: Trying to load FFmpeg libraries from system paths. File name is ‘avformat-55.dll’.
07:37:42: Looking up PATH environment variable…
07:37:42: PATH = ‘C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0;C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH;C:\Users\thesm\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps;’
07:37:42: Checking that ‘’ is in PATH…
07:37:42: FFmpeg directory is in PATH.
07:37:42: Checking for monolithic avformat from ‘avformat-55.dll’.
07:37:42: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘avformat-55.dll’ (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
07:37:42: Loading avutil from ‘’.
07:37:42: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘.dll’ (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
07:37:42: Loading avcodec from ‘’.
07:37:42: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘.dll’ (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
07:37:42: Loading avformat from ‘avformat-55.dll’.
07:37:42: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘avformat-55.dll’ (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
07:37:42: Error: Failed to load FFmpeg libraries.
07:37:42: Error: Failed to find compatible FFmpeg libraries.
07:37:45: Warning: Orphan block file: ‘C:\Users\thesm\Desktop\Aud backup\DV Esp 033121_data\e08\d00\e080000f.au’
In a word, no. Note that the major focus of Audacity 3.0.0 was to restructure the way Audacity stores its data in the hopes of avoiding catastrophes such as this.
And multi-location? It’s not the worst idea to get the conference app (Skype, Zoom) to record the whole show as a backup.
Audacity 2.4.2 is usually pretty good about simple recording a show. That was the standard version for quite a while. The little AU files are about 6 seconds each. Can you open them and play six seconds?
Open the AUP file in a text editor (don’t save anything) and read it. It should look something like this with collections of English and English-like words.
It’s possible that the actual sound files are not damaged, but Audacity just can’t figure out how to open them. How long was the show—or would the show have been.
I don’t mean to get your hopes up, it’s still going to be almost impossible to bring it back, but it would be good to know what happened.
A note. Is this the raw recording? If there are any edits in the show, then that’s the end of the world.
Yeah, the audio files are in tact, playable, and importable to audacity. The aup file doesn’t reference any of them. My only thought for I worked differently is I saved the project prior to recording. Other times I’ve recorded before creating a save file and editing.
No edits were made, it was just over an hour of recording and we’re already rescheduled for Tuesday. I tried a lot of different ideas I found but ultimately don’t believe I have the time to fix it. I will definitely download 3.0 before my next recording!
This is an important broadcast recording I did. The stuff on the left is my setup and Audacity. The stuff on the right is the client’s backup recorder.
Note that the major focus of Audacity 3.0.0 was to restructure the way Audacity stores its data in the hopes of avoiding catastrophes such as this.
