Recorded track but won't play back or save file

[deceasedlavy]

update: PRAISE THE LORD, IT IS WORKING!!! I am eternally grateful, stevethefiddle. You completely saved my ass, and my editor will not have to murder me after all. Thanks again to everyone for all the suggestions and help!!

[deceasedlavy]

p.s. Just a tip from my end, in case anyone else ever has to do this: attempting to add all 1200-odd .au files to the project at once kept crashing the program, so I'm doing it a hundred at a time and it's working fine.

[steve]

my editor will not have to murder me after all.

I'm very pleased about that.

A couple of notes about Audacity 1.3.x
This is the "beta" (testing and development) line, so some versions are not very stable.
I used 1.3.4 on Windows XP for a long time (still got it on one machine) and it is rock solid.
1.3.7 on the other hand was forever falling over.
1.3.9 - very stable on my Linux machine as long as I did not delete label tracks (which caused it to crash)
1.3.10 (alpha) - Rock solid. The most stable version I've used.

Crash recovery in Audacity 1.3.x is very much better than in any 1.2 version. If Audacity 1.3 crashes it has a high success rate of recovering the project automatically when next opened (though you will loose the "Undo History" )

I definitely recommend trying the most up-to-date version of Audacity 1.3.x, but test it thoroughly before doing any important projects so that you can discover if there are any quirks on your hardware. As always, make backups as you go (I understand that on this occasion you did not have that opportunity). Probably the safest form of backup for a recording is to Export as a WAV file as soon as the recording is complete. I also regularly save the project, but using "Save As..." so that I get a series of saved projects (newproject01, newproject02, newproject03, ...). This uses a lot of disk space, but once the project is complete and Exported, burned to CD, or whatever, I can then delete all of the old project versions.

Audacity is now getting very close to releasing the new (Audacity 2.0) stable version, and no new features are being added (just bug fixes).
All known current issues are listed here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... _Checklist
The important ones are the "P2" issues which usually mean that they only affect a few users, or are non-fatal (there are currently no known P1 issues). If you are doing important production work, you need to know if any of these issues will affect you - so it is advisable to test thoroughly.

Of course, the overall stability of your computer is also extremely important. It does not matter how stable Audacity is if there are other stability issues with the computer, so important work should always be done on a clean, well maintained machine, and not the one that the kids play on.

[jamestown0509]

Thanks. Could be I am not seeing the correct file format when saving the project.

[kozikowski]

Audacity projects do not have a "file format" because Audacity will not save sound files. To generate a sound file from your Project you have to Export one. Export As WAV.

Koz

[jamestown0509]

Hi Koz. I have looked on Audacity "file" and the "export" is grayed out. What is confusing is the project was saved with a particular name and the extension was saved as (.aup). If I go to the properties for the file it says saved as .aup file and one of them is 90.7 kb, the other I need to open is 139kb. It would seem since the file was saved as .aup and properties shows it is available why does Audacity say this when I try to open it? "Could not load file."
Sorry to be asking but I see no solutions in the help files.

[steve]

When you save an Audacity project, it creates two items inside the folder you specified for the project:

* a _data folder bearing the name of the project, containing its audio data (in the form of many 1 MB-sized uncompressed .au files).
* an .aup project file bearing the same project name, which is merely a text file that references the _data folder.

See here for more info: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... ement_Tips

[jamestown0509]

Thanks for the help. I changed laptops to my new Dell. Before reformatting the drive for a new person to use my Acer computer I transferred those Audacity files to a zip drive (Cruzer). Apparently when I transferred them I should have gone into the program files and transferred them from the hard drive.

[AndyC]

Did this problem get resolved. i am having exactly the same difficulty

[steve]

Did this problem get resolved.

Yes, it was user error. See here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... ement_Tips