Scattered audio files

Hello everyone, I was just getting ready to export audio files to my phone and as I skimmed through the albums I noticed that some of the saved files are scattered throughout the whole recording , and all of the editing that I’ve done on another file is all gone, from the effects and all of the levels I set are all gone. I have no idea how this happened. I’ve spent a lot of time transferring cassettes to audacity and now I have to do them over. Does anyone know if there’s a way I can retrieve the original file ? and has anyone else ever experienced this issue . Thanks

I don’t understand what you mean by this.

Do you still have something you captured, despite losing the edits ie an original?

I’ve never heard of that happening.

How frustrating. Because the process is time-consuming and cassettes can be fragile, I have changed my workflow so that I save a WAV file as well as an Audacity project file so I have an original capture to go back to instead of recording it again. Sometimes I do it all with Audacity and sometimes I do the capturing with Ocenaudio which doesn’t use a project file but allows saving directly as a WAV file. I can then edit (or re-edit) the WAV file in Audacity if needed.
I hope you manage to salvage your work.
Mark B

Hi, yes I still have parts of the cassettes that I’ve recorded with audacity, but there’s like half an album and pieces scattered throughout the recording. Besides that, yes I have the original cassettes, but this doesn’t make any sense at all. I have two or three of long albums that this happened to in audacity. Is there anyway that I can retrieve the albums that came out right with all of the changes I’ve made ? Isn’t there a way I can retrieve those files ?

I’m still confused but if you have complete songs (if the songs aren’t chopped into fragments) you can open the longer file, select/highlight one song at a time, and then Export Selected Audio.

But it NAY be easier to start over, keeping the songs in order and the albums organized. If the songs are not continuous it’s better to just start over.

…You didn’t explain your procedure so it’s hard t guess what went wrong but typically you’re going to record one side of an album at a time and then split the recordings into individual songs. There a couple of ways of doing that.

I just select & export one song at a time (as above) but there is also a way of labeling the songs and then Export Multiple.

My process is similar to DVDdoug but my cassette deck has auto-reverse so I can record an entire cassette in one go. I chop it up into separate tracks later. These two YouTube videos explain the method I like to use:

How to transfer cassettes
How to split tracks

The videos are 6 years old so they refer to an old version of Audacity but you should get the idea.

Hey guys, after reading my post over I can see how it can be confusing, so I’ll start from the beginning. A few years ago I had transferred some of my cassettes into audacity. I didn’t have any problems with the recording process and the editing. I fixed some mistakes, amplified them, added some bass, etc. Everything went well, so before I tried to export these audio files to MP4 and send them to my phone, I figured to go through them and give them a quick listen. Upon doing so, when listening certain songs were gone, songs were cut off short, and pieces of the album were scattered in different areas of the track. Everything was totally different than the way I recorded it. Everything that I’ve done on approximately three albums is a disaster now. I also noticed that when I go to files to select an album that the data files are showing in the files drop down menu, I’ve never seen that before and I never put any data files into my file list. So I figured that there might be a way to find the original files instead of doing everything over again.
Some how things got scrambled, and I don’t know why. If there’s not a way to retrieve the finished album files, I have the original cassettes, but I have to prevent this from happening again with some of the suggestions you’ve given me. I wish I could post some pictures but that’s not a feature in the audacity forum. I hope I made everything a little more clear. Thanks