Audacity Forum

Have been using Audacity 1.2.6 in Windows XPsp3, since March/April 2009 on a regular basis, mainly to convert vinyl records into .mp3, i have worked on literally hundreds of tracks and not had any major issues. I have also recorded around 15-20 1 hour plus audio recordings then saved them as projects to cut up and divide into shorter mp3's.

Just now i recorded a 1hr selection, played a little bit back to check sounded ok and then saved it, closed Audacity. Came back to machine, opened the project fine and whilst working on an unrelated file in Windows Movie Maker (I think is the order it happened) and Audacity crashed, i neglected to note the error. When i reopened it opened the application ok (no notice of temp files) but i selected project from history and it told me there is nothing in the location and will remove from history. I used Explorer to browse to the location and the _data folder is there but it is empty, the project file is also missing, there is nothing in recycle bin. I have searched all physical drives for *.au and there are no results. There is/was 20-30Gb of space on the HDD which houses the project and temp files

What is more frustrating (todays projects was not of any importance) was the 7 hours of band practice recordings which i had ripped in from a MiniDisc (10 years old) during 7th January 2010 which have also been looted of their content, just the _data is left. Now i don't know if all the files were deleted just now or whether the 7th January files were deleted sometime after 12th Jan when i exported to mp3's, i haven't looked at the 7th projects since then !!

Any ideas on what could have happened ? I can't 'see' any files anywhere to even try to recover from !!

EDIT - i think i also had Ableton Live 8.0.1 open which has the root of the drive Audacity uses as its cache/default store, i was trying to open an .AVI file to grab some audio from it.

You have several red flags sprinkled around your post.

<<<I have searched all physical drives>>>

All of them? How many might that be?

<<<There is/was 20-30Gb of space on the HDD which houses the project and temp files >>>

How much room is there left on the drive housing Audacity, and when was the last time you defragged it?

<<<..Windows Movie Maker .. Ableton Live 8.0.1>>>

And that's not the end of the list, is it? Audacity is a very simple program and likes to work on very simple machines. It doesn't like competing for memory with other sound/video programs and could become unstable. Will all your drives pass an error check and do you defragment everything regularly?

We need to be clear that Audacity Projects are not archival storage. It's very difficult to safely move an Audacity Project. They are intended to be production managers and are brittle and easily damaged. Export as WAV at the conclusion of each capture session and back up the WAV files on separate drives. A massive machine crash should only mean you need to install Audacity again and continue editing from the backup files.

Wholesale destruction of folder contents can be accomplished by a computer virus or other hostile program. If Audacity crashed while a show was open and you were running another production program at the time, I'm not shocked that open and orphaned files and folders were stepped on and deleted.

You might be able to recover some work with an UnErase program. Of the three platforms, Windows is the most likely to succeed at that. Audacity has crash recovery tools to put a show back together under some conditions.

Koz

two physical drives, one in two partitions, install on one physical drive, cache/store for audacity on the other -- > i guess from your tone is not good practice !? will check on status of the system drive, space and health.

its the first time i've been running other audio visual apps at the same time so may well be that - now i know, won't try again. I can understand to some extent the loss or corruption of an active file when an application crashes but not 5 other projects ?! Also i hadn't considered the angle of Audacity as a production manager, i guess i will adjust my techniques !!

thanks for your time and responses, even though i think recovery is unlikely, i will be able to eventually recreate the audio grabs from the source themselves.

And I can tell from your post that you're an experienced television editor with ten years under your belt. You have a very large, fast computer with four internal drives, two USB connected drives and two FireWire drives for editing video.

OK, so maybe not. Right-brain projection is a dangerous thing.

<<<will check on status of the system drive, space and health.>>>

You got other problems first. You shouldn't have any editing program on one partition and the data on another partition of the same drive. There's only one head actuator inside that drive and it has to keep flipping back and forth between the partitions to do the work. Live video or audio is very sensitive to time issues and this practice can cause stuttering, dropped frames/segments, and damage.

Partitioning almost never does what people want. If you have a serious data error in one partition, the whole drive could easily go into the mud. You can count on the partitioned drive speed to be a little less than half of one good drive because of the sharing management overhead.

Using partitioning as an aid to keep your files straight is a terrible idea.

You can use the second physical drive for data. That does work.

<<<i hadn't considered the angle of Audacity as a production manager>>>

That's our joke. Most people want a WAV editor. Audacity is an Editorial Environment Production Manager.

What.

That's why it doesn't Save WAV files. You have to Export to get a sound file. A Project is an environment. You know you can open up your AUP file in notepad and read it? It's not a sound file.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/aup1.jpg

That's a picture of an AUP file (to keep the layout unscrambled). Read down about to the middle of line 8. That's the location and name of a sound file that I used in the project. If anything happens to that sound file on my hard drive -- rename, move, delete -- there is no show. Gone. If you did a lot of production with a lot of files and special effects, the AUP file can go to pages and the show, for all practical purposes is cemented to the computer and immovable. The _data folder is only a part of your problems.

I'm professionally compulsive about editing. At the end of one capture event, I export as WAV immediately and make copies of it at the earliest opportunity. I still have perfect quality work from three jobs ago. Producers are fond of calling six months later: "Do you still have the voice track from Helen in the animation series?"

Of course. I'll post it on our file service for you.

Koz

Oh, right. The missing files. Do a manual virus scan on your computer. The serious one where you lose the machine for two hours. Not the wimpy one that runs in the background.

Microsoft makes one OK virus scanner that they run from microsoft.com. That can act as a backup for your local scanner.

http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwa ... fault.aspx

And no, Audacity isn't in the habit of flushing files in folders that don't happen to be open. Error Check. Error Check.

Koz

Regarding lost files. I ran the aforementioned MS malware tool and a scan using Sophos (7.6) - neither showed anything at all found, there is seemingly plenty of free space on the two drives (one app, one data). The only 'thing' of note in the event viewer is in System Event ID 6004 'A driver packet received from the I/O subsystem was invalid. The data is the packet.' whether it is related to the 'flushed files' there is no obvious link. Since the original post i have recorded two 1hr sessions (saved to WAV straight after ) and successfully edited, saved, closed, restarted opened, edited, exported so as things stand right now appears stable.

Oria wrote:(saved to WAV straight after

"Exported" to WAV - we hear so much confusion between "Save" and "Export" that we become fanatical about using the right terminology

Oria wrote:and successfully edited, saved, closed, restarted opened, edited, exported so as things stand right now appears stable.

Excellent.