File won't save?

[ChaoZ]

I just finished a 15 minute interview with someone and Audacity won't seem to save.
I may be overlooking something simple, but please let me know.

The File menu is active, but save/export options are disabled.

Pressing record and play buttons (which are still active) does nothing. I don't think I'm allowed to hit stop (or otherwise it also does nothing). Skip to end buttons work.
I can select the timeline, but cannot copy it to another instance of Audacity.

What I may have done was unplug the mic before hitting stop on recording.

Backup files (a bunch of .au files) seem intact. I've saved a separate copy as well.

What should I do to recover the file? Is there hope?

Audacity 1.2.6 on Windows 7.

[waxcylinder]

I suspect you may be in Pause mode rather than Stop mode. Lots of stuff doesn't work when you are only paused.

BTW if this is a critical unrepeatable recording I would also suggest experting a safety copy as a WAV file (use settings 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM stereo).

WC

[ChaoZ]

I've tried that. But it won't acknowledge pause, play, record, or stop commands.
I finished the recording and wasn't even given the opportunity to export.

I am importing the temp files from audacity into another computer, one by one, but it seems to be working. Just a really big waste of time as each one is only a few seconds long.

[steve]

What I may have done was unplug the mic before hitting stop on recording.

If it's a USB microphone, that could easily be the problem as Audacity would suddenly be trying to run with no input device connected (and it won't like that at all).

It is strongly recommended that you use the latest 1.3 version on Windows 7 (Audacity 1.2.x was written way back in the days of Windows 98).

There's some information about Crash Recovery here that may help: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... shRecovery

[kozikowski]

Your machine may have crashed at the export step. How did you stop the capture session? You got to the end of the interview and said thank you and then what buttons did you hit? If you didn't press stop, you can send Audacity into Never-Never land.

There are automated tools for recovering a crashed show.

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

I'm of two minds about moving the files to another machine. That's a safety measure in case your main machine goes toes up permanently (are you filling up your hard drive), but I don't know that I would try to recover the show from the second computer. It depends on whether your main machine crashes all the time before the interview.

Koz

[ChaoZ]

The app has not crashed. It's just there. All save/export options grayed out. Can't play either. I feared that if I closed the program, it would delete the temp files.
What I think I did was pull the plug on the mic, which caused Windows to do something, possibly killing the stream? I noticed Windows 7 seems to have separate audio controls for everything.

Yeah, if I didn't hit stop, it may have caused it to go nuts. I'll try the auto recovery tool as well, thanks.

[kozikowski]

Lots of blame to go around.

-- You shouldn't pull USB connections without "putting them away."

-- Windows goes into device management and crash recovery immediately if it loses a "live" USB connection so as not to cause further damage.

-- Audacity does not have infinite recovery, particularly in the early versions. As has been noted, how many packages are there where you're still using the exact same software that you were using in Windows 98?

-- Audacity Development Team insists on calling 1.2 the "Stable" version prompting all sorts of Ancient Software problems (2.0 is in the wings).

Koz

[ChaoZ]

It's not a USB mic. Just the on-board mic port on my netbook.