What happened to my file? Random sections of silence

[TSeanK]

Ok, a newbie hear, coming from ProTools...

I spent a couple hours creating some drum loops, cutting and pasting, puting in some level correction, and some effects.

Now, when I go back and play it, there are sections that just go 100% silent, not near any of the splices either?

Weird thing is, I can see the waveforms, but if I zoom in twice, that shows it going to zero in those places?

Zoom out, I can see the wavesforms as they were orginally there?

Running 1.2.6 on Windows XP home.

Anyone got any advice? If I have to start from scratch, I have lost hours, and it's not going to be easy to drop those pieces in
again, because they are not near any splices, just random drop-outs?

Thanks,

TSeanK

[steve]

In the same way as ProTools saves a project file and the actual audio data is in a separate folder, Audacity does a similar thing. When you save an Audacity project you create a .AUP (Audacity Project file) and a data folder that contains the audio data for the project. For some reason some of the data required by the project is missing. There could be a number of reasons for this, but the first one to rule out is the Audacity version that you are using. In spite of its name, Audacity 1.2.6 is not very stable on many modern computers - try upgrading to Audacity 1.3.11

Also, you can read here about how data is stored in Audacity Projects (essential reading) http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/File_Management_Tips