I’m using audacity-project-tools to recover a broken project file. It’s not clear to me what triggered the file to be broken to begin with - everything was fine, I saved and exited the program as usual, and when I reopened it I got the error “audacity failed to read a file in…”
I have not had any luck with the recommended commands “-drop_autosave” (the resulting file still cannot be opened) and “-recover_db -recover_project” (the resulting file opens, but is empty). It passes -check_integrity. I tried all the other commands listed on the Github repo, and the only one that seemed promising was -extract_project, which yields a project.xml file that seems to have meaningful information that references the correct source files etc. However, when I try to import this as “raw data” I just get a lot of screeching sounds, and the project structure does not resemble what was lost.
What kind of things should I be able to do with the recovered project.xml file? I like to believe that I can use this xml file to rebuild the project using the original source files. Is this the case?
Appreciate any help or guidance. Apologies if the tags are not appropriate, I’m having trouble figuring out which to use as I can’t see any tags on relevant threads such as this one: Corrupt or Otherwise Broken Audacity Project Recovery
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If you don’t mind sharing the project file, I will have a go in tandem with your own efforts. You could upload it to Google Drive and share the link or we can come up with something else.
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Thank you, that’s very kind. Does this link work for you? Proton Drive
Download seems to be working. Will get back to you with my findings.
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Thanks so much.
I just noticed that -analyse_project states that all the blocks are silent. That’s ominous!
Indeed it is. I’ve tried all steps in the audacity project tools. Even though the “recovered” data is 661.8MB there seems to be zero audio data that I can see. I had a very similar one to this a few days ago and I was able to extract the sample blocks. The person I was helping set about gluing them back together. In this case there was nothing to glue. I also tried saved steps from ChatGPT for the other case but it yielded nothing. I think it’s lost, to be honest.
Thanks so much for trying. Do you know what the expected behaviour is for the project.xml file?
I don’t I’m afraid. It would be nice to think it contained the blueprint to reassemble the sample blocks but since there are no sample blocks to assemble, it’s all academic anyway.
Oh hang on - have I been following instructions that assume I did all the recordings directly into Audacity? I have all the required source files from my field recorder here: Proton Drive
Ah well then, a whole new ball game. Create a new Audacity project, import the WAV files into it, SAVE it and then edit as needed.
This means starting from scratch, right? I don’t suppose there’s any chance the project.xml file could be used to recover the work I’d previously done editing these files together?
@zoyander the file you posted is absolutely empty, unfortunately. There is nothing we can extract from it. Do you have the original corrupted file before you tried to fix it, by any chance?
What audacity version were you using?
Thanks so much for taking a look. Unfortunately that is the original corrupted file. Here’s the full folder with source audio files: Proton Drive
Since the project.xml produced by project tools seems to list the correct source files, is there any way to extract and then import just the instructions on what files to use, how to trim them, and what order they should be placed in?