Audacity crashed whilst trying to save as audacity project

[FunKiller]

Hi, hopefully you can help me on this issue..

I was playing in a club at the weekend, and i was recording the sets of the night (about 3 hours) At the end of the night i went to save as .aup file instead of exporting as .mp3 and was planning to edit it later, what happened was that audacity crashed when saving and now all i have is the data file with 3000+ .au files all 6 secs in length..as you can imagine my frustraion at this issue (i frequently record 1 hour mixes with no problemswhen saving)

I have used the audacity recovery software and when it searches for the files to convert into a .wav it says ''153 continous block(s) of .au files found'' as opposed to just 1..i am confused..is there any way of getting all my .au files to just play or converted as one .wav file??



All help appreciated.

[kozikowski]

If you've been through crash recovery and it didn't help, then there aren't a lot more places to go.

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

I rarely use Audacity Projects -- only when I need to suspend a multi-track project and work on it later, pretty much what it was designed to do.

I export live captures as WAV, not MP3. That produces a perfect sound file from the capture session and I can make a safety backup of it in case of damage. It's rough to make reliable copies and backups of multi-file Audacity Projects.

This kind of thing can happen if you run out of hard drive space or have other damage. Did you? Windows hard drives aren't unconditionally open ended. You eventually run out and Audacity will not run into a badly fragmented hard drive. Do the error check, too.

Defrag
-- Right Click Start > Explore > Right Click Local Drive C: > Properties (Used, Remaining)
-- Tools > Error Checking & Defragmentation

If you have any damage, recovery isn't going to work, either.

Koz

[FunKiller]

Thanks for the reply.

Are you suggesting i defrag my (D:) drive, which was where the data saved?? There was enough space for the recording..

I just dont understand why its say '153 continous block(s)' instead of 1 when i try to recover.. i mean, all the files are still there but just split into lots of .au files.

The reason i saved as .aup was because i've had problems when saving as .mp3 before

[kozikowski]

MP3 is a delivery format intended to be the last step in the production process -- the one the end client listens to -- not a production step in the middle. MP3 causes sound damage -- always -- and you can't stop it. WAV format doesn't which is why it's the Audacity default.

Projects are a lot more complex than people think they are.

<<<There was enough space for the recording..>>>

Audacity still won't run into a badly fragmented hard drive or one with errors. The space must be high quality, clear, clean, and contiguous, not just empty. The system drive needs to be all those things, too, in addition to not being over 90% full. Live audio (or video) puts unusual stresses on a machine.

If Audacity crashed in the middle of saving a Project, then you will have holes in the sequences of AU files -- the ones being written when Audacity failed. Crash Recovery will only take you up to the crash point.

One of the Audacity version updates started saving AU files in a completely incomprehensible format. You used to be able to rescue the show manually if you had the time. Not any more. You know the files go left-right-left-right? They're mono and they alternate sides.

Koz

[FunKiller]

i've listened to the .au files and audacity has defintley recorded the full night (you can hear when the dj set ended)... it would take me weeks to copy and paste them all together tho.

the recording itself sounds fine but i just want to find out why the recovery is finding 153 continous blocks and not 1 and how to merge all these files into one continous mix exact to what happened on the night..

[kozikowski]

Past the recovery tools, I know of no way to put it all back together. When Audacity crashes, it creates, however briefly, digital chaos. Even if the individual sound segments are still there, the laundry list of what goes where is missing and the file designators could be scrambled.

There used to be no recovery tools at all. We were very pleased when the developers created the ones they did.

Koz

[FunKiller]

i have only used the audacity recovery software..the other methods confuse me so i am going to get my mate to have a look at it.

If the audio files are still there i refuse to believe (yet) that it cant be fixed..

i guess even if i had saved as a .wav...theres no gurantee my system wouldnt have crashed..

seems to be a common issue with long recordings.

[kozikowski]

<<<seems to be a common issue with long recordings.>>>

I was and and then wasn't going to bring that up. Your show isn't considered a "Long" recording. I have produced three hour presentations myself. Long is the poster several threads over that tried to manage a 14-hour show. He didn't make it.

It's very common to want to manage 6 hours. I don't know what's magic about 6, but there it is. I guess that's one broadcast day on BBC1.

While there's no developmental reason that wouldn't work, there are some severe machine reasons for that to fail. Many people try to do that with a machine completely unprepared. I guessed that the 14-hour guy would need 80GB of perfect, fast drive space to get away with that and have the machine not do anything else. We call those surveillance machines.

Search the forum. There was one outside programmer that went into intense detail about how he was trying to recover his show. There is a system to the file numberings. I just don't know what it is.

It's not unusual to get better searches by dropping out to Google and then let them send you back in. The forum Search function isn't going to win any awards.

As usual, since this forum is a collaborative effort, if you figure it out, post back.

Koz

[FunKiller]

i am tryin to paste the wav segments back together (there are about 30 files of the main dj set that i am trying to salvage) but they seem to be skipping, do you know what could have caused this?