Audacity Forum

I really don't know how it happened but i had 2 hours of audio recorded, i was listening and it was a bit quiet so i highlighted a certain part to amplify and then it cut that portion out of the entire recording after i had amplified the recording and, naturally i tried to undo the process but it went all the way to undo recording and the 2 hour long recording was gone and all i have is 40 seconds...If there is a possible way to retrieve the data please help :]

There is Edit > Redo. Does that bring you back to where you were? If you close Audacity, no matter which tools you are using, the UNDO and REDO services reset and that material is lost.

It's a good idea when you have completed a music or performance capture to Export As WAV. That will produce a very high quality sound file of the show which you can copy to a thumb drive for safekeeping. Audacity Projects are brittle and prone to failures -- although I don't think that's what happened in your case.

I have occasional problems with double clicking when I didn't mean to. Does that happen to you? Each of your errors can be put down to clicking more than once on a tool or action. I think there is a setting for that in Windows Mouse Setup.


If your _data folder is still intact, you might be able to get some of the work back with the Crash Recovery tools. The problem, of course, is that your Audacity didn't crash, so I don't know how well this is going to work.

Crash Recovery
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... shRecovery

Koz

hmm, well i will try that crash recovery thing, but, i tried edit > redo, and it brings me back to the 40 second file instead of my 2 hour long one... and i still haven't closed Audacity yet. I hope that information helps. But this audio has not been saved yet, that is why i am worried, because i can't revert to the original recording.

Does it let you REDO again?

Koz

Yes, it goes to recorded audio, (7mb aka 40 Seconds of my work) and then it is just blank.

No, I mean again, again. A healthy Audacity should let you UNDO and REDO as many times as you want with no damage.

If you do get the whole show back, Export As WAV immediately, if it lets you.

Do you know how full your hard drive is getting? If something like this happens again -- or it won't go back to the original show -- it could be because Audacity no longer has places to put stuff. Audacity will not do live production into a highly fragmented drive, but it won't do anything into a full one.

Koz

Let's see (hauling out calculator) Audacity always does everything internally at maximum quality uncompressed, so one hour at about 700MB gives you two hours at about 1.4GB and with the capture and UNDO services double that again, so a fuzzy 3GB of drive space for your show and still maintain at least 20% free.

Did I just hit the reason your show is in trouble?

Koz