Recovering lost files

[Danny92345]

I can't find an easy answer to this maybe there isn't one - after recording an outdoor concert, Audacity closed before I could save my work. I downloaded the Audacity Recovery Utility, went through the steps and recovered my files. My big problem is that I now have 135 recovered blocks, about 5 seconds of music in each block. Is there a way to connect all these blocks so I have a continuous file of the music I recorded? Did I miss a step with the recovery utility?

Help!

Thanks!

[Gale Andrews]

I can't find an easy answer to this maybe there isn't one - after recording an outdoor concert, Audacity closed before I could save my work. I downloaded the Audacity Recovery Utility, went through the steps and recovered my files. My big problem is that I now have 135 recovered blocks, about 5 seconds of music in each block. Is there a way to connect all these blocks so I have a continuous file of the music I recorded? Did I miss a step with the recovery utility?

What version of Audacity are you using (Help > About Audacity or Audacity > About Audacity on a Mac computer) and what operating system?

If the blocks are 5 seconds long they are no longer than the .au files you are trying to recover. Is the concert only 11 minutes long, or are there other folders you need to recover from?

Are you entering the "Number of Channels" in the recovery utility?




Gale

[Danny92345]

I'm using audacity 1.2.6 on windows vista.

The concert was over an hour long.

I entered 2 channels in the audacity recovery utility.

Thanks for your time!

[Gale Andrews]

I'm using audacity 1.2.6 on windows vista.

The concert was over an hour long.

I entered 2 channels in the audacity recovery utility.

Did you edit the project or did Audacity crash as soon as you pressed Stop? That is a known problem in 1.2.6 on Vista, and you would on balance be better to upgrade to 1.3.12 Beta.

If you edited the project I think there are circumstances (pasting) in which the recovery utilities will create multiple recovery blocks even if the filenames are a contiguous alphanumeric sequence. I just tried recovering a short stereo recording made in 1.2 where I amplified two 15-second sections in the middle. There was only one left and one right recovery WAV as expected, but the amplified sections were recovered at the end of the audio.

So as with recovering files recorded on 1.3 Beta, the recovery utilities aren't going to cope well with edited audio (though at least in 1.2 the amplified sections are complete in themselves and in the correct channel order, which would not be true if you used those utilities on files recorded and edited in 1.3.x).

If your .au files are in contiguous alphanumeric order already, probably you are not going to be able to do much but import the largest recovery wavs and then see if the short ones can be dropped into place to fill gaps.

Note the 1.3 line does have automatic crash recovery so strictly the utilities should not then be needed. The developers are working very hard to improve 1.3.12 crash recovery for the next Beta and it should be much less prone to crash on Vista anyway,




Gale

[Danny92345]

Thanks for your help!

Audacity crashed when I pressed stop. I will definitely upgrade to the Beta version before I try this again!

The blocks were in numeric order, but with gaps - example - from 00089 to 00095. I'll chock this up to a learning experience. It wasn't one of the bands better concerts, so maybe this was a good thing! hahaha!

Again, thank you so much!