Recorded files disappear after closing prgrm

[Hannothor]

Hi there,
Using 1.2.6 a number of times succesfully (recorded LPs / transfered to .Wav and Mp3 and even burned to CD), but now encountered a strange problem!
When recording an LP, the .aup files and associated data files are nicely stored in the project; Exporting to .WAV and .Mp3 is still possible and even playing back in 1.2.6 works fine.
However, when closing Audacity and running a burner (Roxio) all .WAV and .Aup are gone! What remains in place is the data files in the au da_temp directory buth this is useless and cannot be accessed.
System runs on Winxp sp3 without network,
Anybody ideas??
regards

[kozikowski]

Sudden Computer Insanity can be cause by your hard drive filling up.
My Computer > right-click C: > Properties.

Two numbers. How big is the drive and how much is left?

Have you ever defragmented your drive?

Koz

[steve]

However, when closing Audacity and running a burner (Roxio) all .WAV and .Aup are gone!

Where have you exported the WAV/MP3 files to?

[Hannothor]

Hi, thanks for the instant reply and this forum is great.
HD space left is +98 Gb (out of 120 Gb total space), so plenty of room i would say. HD is brandnew / defrag done very recently. .WAV and .MP3 are stored in the default Audacity_temp directory.
I'm experimenting with shorter filenames rather than the previously used longer ones with spaces in between in order to figure out if that helps.

[kozikowski]

<<<in the default Audacity_temp directory.>>>

Try not doing that. The temp directory is a little magic. Make a new directory called some new name and put your exports in there.

Be careful with your file names. Upper and lower case letters, numbers, dash, and underscore. That's it. No other characters and certainly no other punctuation marks. The truly compulsive will avoid spaces, too. We have a filename convention at work that uses Upper Case to separate words. MyReallyGreatMusic-monday.wav

Koz

[steve]

We have a filename convention at work that uses Upper Case to separate words. MyReallyGreatMusic-monday.wav

The other common convention is to use the underscore: my_really_great_music-monday.mp3

This format is probably better if you are posting on the internet as it avoids problems that can arise from the fact that some web servers are case sensitive, and some are not, and that many web servers will replace spaces with "%20".

[Hannothor]

I'm now using a new dir. called " Export" in the root of the HD; Filenames used are: "Beachboysgreatest1" , "Miller2" etc.
My .aup's and .wav's still still disappears in 50% af all cases when closing audacity while the " Name_data" files with all the chunks of 1 mb recordings remain nicely in place,
More suggestions?

[steve]

My .aup's and .wav's still still disappears in 50% af all cases when closing audacity

I presume that you are using "File menu > Save As" to save the project before you close Audacity?

[Newbieuser]

I seem to have run into a similar problem, by using spaces in some filenames. Is there any way to recover these files, as simply renaming them, modifying the .aup file to redirect to the renamed file, and renaming the _data folder does not work.

[steve]

Audacity 1.3.12 is far more tolerant of non-alpha-numeric characters than the old 1.2 version. File names must be valid for the operating system, for example on Windows you cant use a "" in a file name. Using only letters, numbers, hyphen and underscore is the recommended way to name any file.