I am running MAC 10.10, and Audacity 2.0.6. I know I did several things wrong that led to this outcome, so bear with me. I had taped a 56 minute interview and didn’t save it immediately, when i tried to begin editing, Audacity was frozen, i restarted it and there were two recovered files with the same name. One was a 5 minute long at the start of the interview and the second file showed 56 minutes ( i saved that with a new name), then when I opened the now saved file, realized that all 56 minutes was now a flat line. I went to the data files and clicked on the data and these were also, flat. I definitely recorded the audio when i taped it, Is there anyway to recover my original files. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated. I am not very good with the backend side of computers but willing to learn if written simply. Thanks in advance.
Although probably not relevant to your issue, Audacity 2.0.6 came out before Yosemite was released so never officially supported Yosemite. Did you sleep the computer before returning to the project?
If you only had one project window open, that is a bad sign, because there should have been only one recovery file.
Was the audio flatlined before you saved the project? If so, you saved the audio flatlined and that is how it will now always be, I’m afraid.
If you import the AU files into Audacity and they are are a flat line, and there is no error shown for that import in Help > Show Log… (see the bottom of the log) then the audio is just silence. There is no way to change that.
There will be no Time Machine backup unless you changed the Audacity temporary directory to a location it backs up. It does not back up the default Audacity temp location of /var/folders.
If Audacity could not read its temporary directory when you first recovered the project, or if the AUTOSAVE recovery file was corrupted and pointing to a non-existent temporary directory, then Audacity itself would silence the data. If you never quit Audacity since the first recovery, the log may shed some light on what happened
In case you have a system problem I would advise opening Finder then Go > Utilities > Disk Utility. Select your system drive and Verify Disk and then when that’s done, Repair Permissions.
If the Mac did not wake up correctly, try resetting the System Management Controller (SMC).
Gale