Audacity Forum

It may be because I fell asleep while recording so it ended up being a 10 hour long recording but I can't do anything with it. I can't play it, I can't save it, I can't cut any of it, I can't copy any of it, pressing pause or stop does nothing and it also says they're disabled, I can't record, all I can do is highlight selections and zoom in and out.

Have you run out of free usable disk space?

If so you may be able to rexcue this recording if you hace an external USB disk with plenty of free space as you may be able to:

1) Export the project as a WAV to the USB disk.
2) Close Audacity
3) Delete the project (if you Saved it under a project name - if you are just working with temp files Audacity should have cleaded thos up on exit)
4) Free up space on your disk - remove unwanted files, move offline infrequently used files (movies and photos and audio take up a lot od space)
5) Defrag your disk
6) Re-open Audacity
7) Import the WAV file from the USB disk - make sure you have the "Copy In" "Safer" option set in yout Import Preferences

You should be doing steps 4 and 5 regularly anyway - computers work better with plenty of available free disk-space.

Good luck,

WC

It says that disk space remains for 142 hours and 40 minutes of recording so I doubt that's the problem. I've also been defragging. I have tried to save it on both the computer and external means but "save project as", "save project" and "export as wav" are greyed out.

Are you in Pause mode? You need to be in Stop mode for the Exports to be availabel (i,e, un-greyed).

I should have though of the simpler explanation first

WC

I've pressed stop countless times but still no difference. Also, when I hover my cursor over the stop icon, it says "Stop(disabled)" at the bottom. It also says that pause is disabled. And the weird thing is that the stop icon turns brighter when I click away from a highlighted piece of audio but then goes back to being dulled before I can click it...

Well I'm stumped

The only thing I can think of is that you may have run into a project size limitation (it's been a while since I used 1.2 so I can't remember its operational details too well).

The biggest problem that you have is that auto-recovery in 1.2 is pretty poor, mailnly manual - but it may be your only hope. To get to that you would need to crash out of Audacity - used Ctrl+Alt+Delete to invoke Windows Task Manager and stop the Audacity application. Then see this article in the Wiki on restore: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/CrashRecovery

It's brutal, it's not easy but it may be your only hope - you shouldn's need to patch together all the audio as I'm sure you dont want/need the whole ten hours.

You may want told off a little in case anyone else pops by with a gentler, easier solution ...

For future use upgrade to 1.3.13 (the latest Beta - now vey mature) where auto recovery is much improved. You can ger 1.3 from here: http://audacityteam.org/download/

Oh, and 1.3 also has a "Timer Record" function added - available from the Transport menu. You can use this to set start and stop times, like your VCR/PVR. This will help you prevent future over-runs

WC

Alright, I'll try that if there's nothing else for a while. I'll definitely be using 1.3 in future.

Iceloli9 wrote:Alright, I'll try that if there's nothing else for a while.

Good luck ...

Iceloli9 wrote: I'll definitely be using 1.3 in future.

Smart move

WC