Audacity Forum

Hi all

I work at a university, where I deal with post-processing a lot of audio recordings. I've just been passed a full week of seminars (5x 6 hour days to post-process! ). They were all recorded in Audacity, with a separate AUP for each half-day. However, the AUP files for 2 of the sessions are missing.... I've got all the raw audio (short AU files that Audacity puts in the _data folder). Is there any way to rebuild a new AUP file that contains all these tiny wave-blocks so I can bounce it to wav and start working on it? I'm not keen on dragging 1000 files by hand onto a track to rebuild it manually, so I was hoping there'd be a standard method for generating a new AUP file based on the Audio Unit files in the _data folder.

I'm sure there's relevant detail I've missed out here, so if you need more info in order to help me out don't hesistate to ask! I'm running Audacity 1.2.4 on Windows XP SP2.

many thanks in advance!

(as a long shot if someone could tell me about the AUP file format, how it is structured etc then I could write a script to generate a new AUP based on the date-stamps and names of the Audio Unit files)

*eeek*

I've just found the raft of information on this topic in the wiki. Sorry to have wasted everyone's time, looks like the Audacity Recovery Utility is gonna have me sorted.

<<<Is there any way to rebuild a new AUP file that contains all these tiny wave-blocks so I can bounce it to wav and start working on it?>>>

As a rule, no. The wiki page has only limited usefulness even though there is a segment titled Disaster Recovery (or something like that). Let us know if it worked for you, but I'm not on the edge of my seat.

I would do something predictable and then rip the AUP file apart to see what happened. I've done that a couple of times, but not enough to regenerate millions of files. I know the top half is left and the bottom is right, and I know you need a really large screen because either WordPad or TextEdit needs to open up enough to keep the xml text lines from folding.

I opened up a simple sound file and saved a project in a completely different folder so Audacity had to create segments of the AUP file to tell Audacity where the new folder was. Then it was a simple matter to open up the AUP file and look for the code lines I know had to be there.

There was one poster who got as far as trying to put the capture clips back together manually and discovered they were out of numerical order. That was as far as he got.

If you do figure out how to do this, by all means post back, even if it's a programming hack. One of the most frustrating problems posted on the forum is..."My capture crashed and left 5,732 AU files... . I really need that capture to work." One of the posters had a computer problem and had multiple crashes. We're guessin' he's seriously toast and needs to fix his computer.

Koz