Audacity Forum

Recorded a track and saved it. Closed it re-opened in "Recent file" in file menu. played okay a few times. Closed. Opened again, not in Recent files. Found data folder with track in 14 pieces. can only open one at a time. can't find it together any where. I would like to save this track. what can I do? and what am I doing wrong?

When you save an Audacity project as <project_name> it creates a number of things

1. a top level master project file called <project_name>.aup
2. a folder at the same filing level called <project_name>_data
3. and within the folder a sub-folder structure with lots of little .au files - segments of the recording (mainly audio clips - but a couple of them are graphics files)

When you re-open a project with Audacity you should always open the <project_name>.aup top level file. This tells Audacity how to thread together all the little .au files. It is deliberately designed this way so that Audacity doesn't have to open and work with a single humungously large file, which would hamper performance. You should not be attempting to open or manipulate any individual .au files.

When you have finished editing your Audacity project you can Export it from Audacity as a WAV file or MP3 file depending what sound quality you wish to achieve. WAV files are around ten times larger than the equivalent MP3 files but are uncompressed and thus the audio quality is higher.

WC

I see the file with the .aup extention that I saved, and I also see the dupe that I saved as a safety.
neither of them will open in Audacity. I get a message that Audacity couldn't find the file.

The .aup files for these recordings as well as the .au data files are all in a folder on my desktop. the individual .au files will open one at a time in Audacity and play -- so we know they are there, but why can't the project file be found? Is there a way to create a new project from the data files? or is my Audacity file corrupt, should I install it again? (if so do I need to uninstall this one? I assume that since the data files are sitting on my desk top, they would be saved if I re-installed Audacity? right? I read that in the forum.

how did they get to the desktop?

did you move or rename ***anything*** **anywhere** ?????

What is the name of the AUP file?