Audacity Crashed - recovered manually

[oaklawnchog]

OK - so I was recording our church's Sunday sermon, and when I hit the "stop" button, I got an error message that said "Audacity has encountered a problem and must close." with 2 options, one to search for a solution on the web and close and the other to just close. So, I had no choice but to close the program.

Then, I opened up audacity and it said that there were temp files that audacity could not recover automatically, but I could recover them manually. Did I want the temp files to be deleted. I said no and tried to find something on how to recover the files. Eventually, I found the files in the temp folder and they were in 12 second pieces. So, I spent all day yesterday putting it back together again. I opened up the first piece, then opened up the second piece, selected all, cut and pasted it onto the end of the first piece. I repeated this process (for a long time), occasionally listening to make sure everything was going OK. Once I was done with that, I was pretty tired so I closed it down. This morning, I opened it up to give it one last listen before posting it on our web-site, and everything looks fine. The screen shows a normal looking screen, with high and low points just like normal all along the recording. However, it only plays audio for a couple of seconds, then stops and is silent for a long time, then will play a little more audio. It seems to only be playing what I might have listened to yesterday when putting it back together. I really hate to think I spent this much time putting this back together for nothing. Is there any way to get my audio back?

[Gale Andrews]

You could have used one of our crash recovery tools to reconstruct all the au files automatically:
http://audacityteam.org/help/faq?s=file ... h-recovery

When you exited last night you saved a project, is that correct, and now you are re-opening that project? Have you got all the original au files still available in the same place and with the same names as when you imported them and pieced them together? The project audio may depend on having them there. See:
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... ndent_file

Gale

[jan.kolar]

If you have Audacity 1.2.x and if you did just start-Record-Stop-crash (or nearly that) you are in the same situation I was once.
You might consider to repeat what I did: Put this files inside a similar project. Details:
Backup copy your original files from temp
View your the files - all files are in the same directory, numbered from zero, and they will be the same size with exception of one or two. Any more exceptions?

Record similar project - a bit longer, exactly the same setting. Any sound/noice/silence.
Save it as AAA and close audacity.
Compare the content of AAA_data with what you have in temp: They are exactly the same filenames and have the sime size. (The are some more files perhaps.)
Replace the files in AAA_data by those from temp.
Open project AAA, check, delete what it is longer at the end, Export, check.

Did this help?

Can I ask, what is your OS, do you have laptop, do you have WiFi and what was its state (switched on?, some network present?) ?

[Gale Andrews]

If you have Audacity 1.2.x and if you did just start-Record-Stop-crash (or nearly that) you are in the same situation I was once.
You might consider to repeat what I did: Put this files inside a similar project. Details:
Backup copy your original files from temp View your the files - all files are in the same directory, numbered from zero, and they will be the same size with exception of one or two. Any more exceptions? Record similar project - a bit longer, exactly the same setting. Any sound/noice/silence.
Save it as AAA and close audacity. Compare the content of AAA_data with what you [backed up from] temp: They are exactly the same filenames and have the sime size. (The are some more files perhaps.) Replace the files in AAA_data by those from temp. Open project AAA, check, delete what it is longer at the end, Export, check.

That's quite a good tip if the crash recovery tool does not want to recover properly and you are confident about what you are doing. There is no need to wait for a recording - you can simply generate silence of the required length, which is immediate. You may still have to compute the correct length of project to create if you were recording unattended. You can do this by noting the number of au files in the temp folder, and checking your project rate (bottom left) and sample format (Quality tab of Preferences). At Audacity's default 32 bit 44100 Hz settings there will be 10 .au files for each minute of mono recording, or 20 for each minute of stereo recording.


Gale

[jan.kolar]

- you can simply generate silence of the required length, which is immediate

NOT !
I am enough clever to do that if it would be expected to work. This cannot work just because it is immediate.
Gale, this creates NO .au file. It just writes many <silentblockfile> to .aup file.
It could work with generate noise or generate tone (which is not immediate but several times faster than recording {update: this spead up can never work if you recorded stereo}). You can try if that produces .aup files identical (IDENTICAL) to that of recordings; I will do sometimes if there is a group of users prefering my method.

I looked at the link Gale wrote ( http://audacityteam.org/help/faq?s=file ... h-recovery ) carefully after my posting, and I see it has now windows/mac installer, starts with a dialog with mono/stereo option and it gets sampletype/rate info from some of the .au files itself.
Thus it is very serious competitor now.

For crash after edits, I recommend the link.
For crash after plain recording I recommend to choose any method and switch to other method if the results are not immediate.

[Gale Andrews]

OK, some egg on my face, I was playing with this idea before I wrote, trying to make it more useful and jumped too many steps.....

You're right, generating silence writes no .au files, just instances of <silentblockfile> to the .aup file. What I had already found out was that generating a tone does work, if the lost recording is mono. Unfortunately the trick does not extend to replacing a stereo recording. I tried both generating a tone into a new stereo track, and generating a mono tone and duplicating it, but it only produces half the number of .au files. Recording a short section and using Effect > Repeat does not work either.

Given the time needed to re-record, and the possibility for error directly copying the .au files, I don't think we should recommend this method as a first option. If crash recovery tools do not work (they do sometimes seem to fail with longer audio even though the data is less than 2 GB), then I think re-recording is well worth mentioning on the Wiki page. And to people who recorded in mono and are confident copying files to another folder, tone generation is an excellent alternative. When 1.4 comes out, all this will be a thing of the past for most people anyway.


Gale

[kozikowski]

<<<When 1.4 comes out, all this will be a thing of the past for most people anyway.>>>

Cool. Are we getting rid of the "I saved my project and then cleaned up. Where did my show go?" problem? Related and also very popular.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

Are we getting rid of the "I saved my project and then cleaned up. Where did my show go?" problem? Related and also very popular.

Most people won't need crash recovery tools in 1.4 if Automated Crash Recovery works. If it doesn't then using those tools is more complex because of the random numbering of the .au files that we use in 1.3+. Of course if people clean out those hundreds of funny litle .au files then they have a slight problem. That's a question of educating them about projects...

[jan.kolar]

Gale wrote:
<< random numbering of the .au files>>
Why is that used ? Could that be changed back to consecutive, or consecutive starting from random point?

<<<When 1.4 comes out, all this will be a thing of the past for most people anyway.>>>

Cool. Are we getting rid of the "I saved my project and then cleaned up. Where did my show go?" problem? Related and also very popular.

Koz

What Koz means, is that not many users expect they should not delete wav files they imported into Audacity.
No-copy option as default for importing is nothing else than a trap.

[steve]

<< random numbering of the .au files>>
Why is that used ?

Exactly what I thought

No-copy option as default for importing is nothing else than a trap.

It is useful when working on large files, but I would prefer the "Safe" options to be the default.
(Isn't it more usual for default values to offer "safe" settings where possible?)