Recover 17h recording?

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I was unaware that there’s an upper limit to the length of recordings in Audacity 2.0.4 and recently saved a 17 hour project (from what I’ve understood from other posts there is still an upper limit of about 13.5 hours when recording at 44100Hz). The recording is impossible to recreate and I am willing to spend as much time as possibly needed if it would get the audio back.

As it stands, Audacity won’t open the project, starts with the error “Warning: Track Audio Track had error reading clip values from project file.”, and then if asked to try to open the project anyway goes on to identify every project file as orphaned from what I can tell. I have made untouched copies of all files before trying to open the project though.

Attached is the error log file when opening one of the copies (had to zip it to get it under the 2MB limit). What are my chances of getting anything back? Would it be possible for instance by editing the *.aup file?
log.zip (71.1 KB)

2

Yes the limitation still exists and is the first “Headline issue” in the Release Notes http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Release_Notes_2.0.4#Large_Projects

Was this an unedited mono recording? If so then I think you may have a reasonable chance of recovering most of the data, though it will be an arduous task to do so.
If the project contained more than one track, was stereo, or had been edited, then the task becomes much harder and you may only be able to recover fragments.

That is important. You should have a folder with nearly 600 .au files in it. Do you have a safe copy of that?

There is a page on the Audacity wiki that describes the process of recovering the data: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Crash_Recovery
Good luck.