Won't Save Audio File

[melhegg]

So I just recorded something on Audacity and the file is there on my Audacity window. But when I click on File, all the export and save commands are greyed out. I can't press on them. And its stopped recording. When I mouse over the stop button it says Stop (disabled) and I can't play it back. I'm not sure what happened but it is critical that I save this file but for some reason I cannot! What can I do to save it and why won't it let me save it. I need an answer before my computer dies in a little bit so I'm in a bit of a tizzy! Thanks for your help!

[steve]

It sounds like Audacity may have crashed, or at least "frozen".

First, have a cup of tea and calm down - there is a greater risk of destroying all chance of recovery if you are in a tizzy.
Accept the possibility that you may have already lost everything, then anything that you are able to recover will be a happy bonus.

Do not close Audacity - not yet.

Check the obvious things first - You have pressed the "STOP" button and not just the "PAUSE" button?

If you have saved your project at any point, there will be a file called <filename>.aup and a folder called <filename>_data
The ".AUP" file does not contain any of the audio data - it is more like a musical score that ties the bits of data together.
The "data" folder contains the audio data - hundreds of little data fragments each ending in the letters ".au"

If you have not yet saved the project, the .AUP file and data folder will not yet exist, but the data fragments of your recording (the ".AU" files) will be in the Audacity temporary folder. The default location for the temporary folder on Windows XP is "C:windowstempaudacity_1_2_temp". On Vista it may be in your profile folder somewhere but I'm not sure. If Audacity is still responding, go to "Edit menu > Preferences > Directories tab" where it will tell you the exact location of the temporary file.

If you are able to locate either the "_data" folder (if the file has been previously saved), or the "temp" folder (if the project has not been saved), then make two copies of it. One will be the data for you to try and recover, the other will be a backup copy.

If you have not saved the project and are unable to locate the "temp" folder, and are unable to get Audacity to respond to anything you will need to take a chance and force quit Audacity. To find the location of the temp folder you will need to restart Audacity. It will probably ask if you want to delete "orphan files". DO NOT DELETE THE ORPHANS! The orphan files are your lost data - if you delete them they are lost and gone forever.

Once you have located the data folder/temp folder and made copies of it. Sit down and have another cup of tea.

Now go to this page to read everything we know about crash recovery: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/CrashRecovery

For future reference - Audacity 1.3 is a lot less prone to crashing than the old 1.2.6 version for many modern machines, and in the event of a crash it is often able to automatically recover the project. Unless you are using an ancient computer I would recommend upgrading to the most recent version of Audacity 1.3.

After making an important recording it is strongly recommended that you Export the track as a WAV file (for back-up purposes) as soon as possible.

One thing we have not looked at is why Audacity crashed. Running out of disk space is usually fatal and you will need to free up a load of space before you can attempt recovery. Audio programs need a lot of room to work with and Windows should always have at least 10% free disk space to play with.