Recovering session data without the autosave file

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Hello,

Is there any way to recover the .au session data when the autosave file no longer exists.

I made the mistake of opening audacity when the external drive with the session data wasn’t attached.

The autosave file was automatically removed from the Application Support\Audacity folder and now I have the raw unedited .au files just as they were recorded.

If I make a copy of these files I am able to open them using the Import Audio menu. However as there are a few hundred of these I don’t fancy trying to stitch them together manually.

I wondered if there is a batch file available that can stitch them together?

Any insight into the naming format used in order to decipher the order they should go in? I noticed that there are several files for each filesystem timestamp period, but importing them as they are sorted in the directory doesn’t import them consecutively.

Am I correct in thinking the individual .au files are mono, so for each timestamp period there is a left .au and a right .au?

2

I think the Party Line is no hope without the AUP Project Manager file or a live joined app.

Yes, they are little 6-second snippets that the AUP file knows how to stitch together into a show, and yes they do alternate Left and Right. What they don’t do is have predictable file names. They are intentionally scrambled to avoid collisions and overwriting.

There used to be a technique to use the time/date stamps to partially retrieve a damaged show. I think that never worked very well because Windows time stamps never got close enough to do a good job.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recovering_crashes_manually.html

Koz

3

Thanks for confirming what I suspected, and the additional link - I’d not seen that article when searching before.

I might have a further play about with reconstructing the segments if I have some spare time out of curiosity, but think it’s a lost cause due to the sheer number of segments involved.