Audacity Forum

OK so this is the second time I have opened audacity to find that a track of sound has disappeared. What's even more frustrating is it sees the sound but wont play it. The first time I lost about 4 tracks. this time only one. Here's the problem. I am a musician recording work not just taking songs off the internet. When a track suddenly disappears I lose my time and work. It's a real kick between the legs when you spend HOURS on something and it's just suddenly gone. So what caused it the first time was trying to get professional with it and copying and pasting sound on the same track like Acid can do. That mangled the sound. So i made sure never to copy or paste again. Only duplicate. So I finally finished a rough draft of this complex song and exported it to WAV and backed it up and all the sound is there. this would be fine but it's a slop copy and not good for professional purposes. So I wake up the next day and open up Audacity with the intent on mastering it through home stereo system which it needed. I even saved it as a second aup file or just a second version so if it mangles something I can go back to the previous but it did me NO GOOD. The last track of sound that I SO painstakingly created and edited is gone. rather it APPEARS to be there but plays nothing.

Please dont just paste that same old speach about how audacity deals with sound and the difference between auf files and audio files and that I must have gone in and cleaned or deleted something or moved something. No. All i did was export audio for monitoring purposes and saved as a new copy. Is your program just not stable? Am i ever going to get this track back?

<<<it sees the sound but wont play it.>>>

Actually, what it sees is the first two AU files in the _DATA folder, which are graphic files and draw the blue waves. They have almost nothing to do with whether or not Audacity can actually find your sound files. The blue waves and reality can get out of step very easily.

<<<I even saved it as a second aup file or just a second version>>>

You gotta stop using English words like that. You did not save an AUP file. You saved an Audacity Project which, as we frequently point out is a festival of files, some audio, some not.

<<<When a track suddenly disappears I lose my time and work. >>>

You should never lose original performance captures. Ever. After a successful live capture, Export As WAV immediately and then make copies if you suspect instabilities. Or it's just an important song.

Productions in progress, yes, do have to be Saved As Projects. That's the only way to suspend effects, but, it is also known that Projects do not save everything. I forget the list, but some Effects forget what to do after being saved as a Project. This comes as a nasty surprise when you're in the middle of a complex show.

But that's not what you have. You have wholesale chunks of the Project missing.

<<<exported it to WAV and backed it up and all the sound is there.>>>

Say that again and use more words. The WAV Export is pretty simple, but what do you mean by "backed it up?"

If you're not intentionally cleaning up, moving, or deleting stuff, then something is. When was the last time you updated your Virus Protection? I mean manually, not that auto thing that's supposed to run in the background. How full is your hard drive and when was the last time you defragged? Audacity will not work into a full or badly fragmented hard drive.

Hard drive error check? That's pretty easy to do in Windows. Which Windows?

Koz

This is one of my favourite pages on the Audacity wiki - it explains where the sound goes to when it jumps out of your projects: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... ement_Tips