Can't Find Project Folder, Project is gone!

[IAmTheBlackWizards]

I really need help here. I was recording my guitar tracks and everything was fine. Then Audacity started to slow down, freeze up, take an extra few seconds to respond. There were a lot of tracks in this project, and I know that it was the cause of the slow response. I tried to play my song, listening to what I just recorded, and it stopped responding and wouldn't come back. Since I had saved prior to recording that last track, I didn't worry about it. I just closed audacity. I came back a few minutes later, opened audacity, and tried to open the project. I got the error, "Could not find the project data folder", followed by, "Unable to open the project file". Is this recording that I spent hours and hours on GONE??? Any help getting this fixed would be AMAZING! And please b very very specific, and tell me exactly what to do. I'm pretty stupid when it comes to this stuff. Thanks! Oh, and I'm on Windows XP.

[kozikowski]

-- Right Click Start > Explore > Right Click Local Drive C: > Properties (Used, Remaining)

I'm insanely sure you ran out of heard drive space. If you never checked it, now is good. You don't have to know what the numbers mean, you do need to know that a good, roomy computer is only using half or 3/4 of its hard drive. For production, you need at least 20% of the drive free, and it should be defragmented.

Defrag
-- Right Click Start > Explore > Right Click Local Drive C: > Properties (Used, Remaining)
-- Tools > Error Checking & Defragmentation

Windows isn't particularly good about how it stores things on its hard drive and as the computer ages, the storage gets scrambled. Picture a wall of books. Somebody takes out three or four at random and then buys and tries to store one really large book. You might actually have to cut the book in half to get it to fit on the wall -- Chapters 1-30 here and Chapters 31-90 over there. Hard drives get that way, too. It doesn't matter when you're calculating spreadsheets, but it's hell on music or video production.

Say somebody wanted that book in a big hurry. You'd have to find both halves and jam it back together. It's much slower.

There should be other things wrong, but that's my bet.

Koz

[IAmTheBlackWizards]

ok, thank you. I will try defragmenting and checking for errors.

[IAmTheBlackWizards]

Ok, I finally got my CPU cleaned off enough to defragment. I did, and it didn't work. Also, last night, another project failed to open. It was not preceeded by Audacity crashing though.. I have 12.9 GB out of 71 GB free at this point, and I'm continuing to try and free up some space. But what should I do now? I'd like to get an album finished in the next few weeks before I have to leave for college! Thanks!

[steve]

If you're using Audacity 1.2.x you need to be very careful about using only standard alpha-numeric characters in file names, track names and metadata. Audacity 1.2.x does not support Unicode characters.

Also, file names must only contain "legal" characters, so avoid using slashes, back-slashes or any kind of punctuation characters in file names. Safe characters are letters, numbers, space, hyphen and underscore.

If your project includes and imported MP3s, check the metadata.

I'd highly recommend that you upgrade to Audacity 1.3.13 http://audacityteam.org/download/

[IAmTheBlackWizards]

Ok, I checked, and in the file names, the song names, everything, there were no weird characters. All letters. I also downloaded version 1.3.13 and tried to open it with that. Still nothing. Both projects "can't be found", and are "unable to open". Any other ideas?

[steve]

Both projects "can't be found", and are "unable to open".

What is the actual error message?