I’m using Windows 8.1 and Audacity 2.1.1.
I was recording an interview on two channels when I noticed that the waveform was no longer updating. The recording had just stopped. The PC wasn’t crashed and neither was Audacity. The record button was down so I pressed stop, and I exported both tracks to WAV (Audio Track.wav, Audio Track-1.wav). I didn’t save the project, I just closed the recording window and then hit record again and resumed. When I finished the interview, I again exported to WAV ---- and it defaulted to the same filenames and overwrote without confirmation (???).
Before I closed Audacity or did anything else, I poked around and found the Temp folder which contains a project folder which contains a number of folders with the .au temp files. I copied that to the desktop and yes, when I did save the project and quit Audacity, it removed them. I had hoped for automatic recovery when I restarted Audacity but nope. I guess because the project is technically intact, in that the last 45 minutes is there and the window that I closed isn’t there.
I’ve read various posts and the manual page about recovery, but they make me think that if Audacity thinks it’s crashed, it’ll automate the process. But if it doesn’t think it’s crashed, how can I get it to do some of the magic on bringing those files back in nicely? As you can imagine I have about 1900 files, with names like e00007ad.au etc. I checked out a few and they are indeed from this initial “lost” half of the interview.
I realize this is a frequent topic but I wasn’t able to find this specific situation described, so followup questions and recommendations etc. appreciated.