Audacity Forum

I had a recording of a show and audacity crashed. I was able to recover the files, and I have spent all morning putting the whole thing together, by pasting the little pieces that are named b000002 and so on. I have been saving the project as i go along, and I'm up to 27 minutes and things were just fine, but now I hit play and I can't hear anything. I have all the waveforms and everything, but it just won't play. Yes, the volume is up, I don't have any headphones plugged. The other little pieces that I still have to paste to finish the program I can hear, but not the big thing that I just put together. Is there an explanation for this? In order to make things easier I had been deleting the individual files, as I advanced. So now I only have from 590 on, but shouldn't I be able to listen to the other big chunk I finally put together? please help. I am using a mac laptop with MacOS 10.5.6.

Don't empty your trash.

Can you put all that back where it was? There are software tools that can reassemble your show from the crashed pieces, as long as you don't mess with the pieces.

Crash Recovery
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... shRecovery

The blue wavefoms are drawn from two graphic files which turn out to be the first two AU files. It's perfectly possible for there to be a full waveform and no show.

If you did any effects or production to your show, the numbered files will not line up. Did you pick out that each file is alternately left and right? Anyway, if you actually deleted any of the original files, that may be the end of your show.

Koz

Unfortunately I did empty the trash. I did notice the files alternate from left to right and actually assembled the whole thing in two tracks, to have both channels. I didn't do any production, I've just been cutting and pasting. I was able to hear the whole thing until a few "cut and paste"s ago.

Why is the temp folder now empty? That's the other problem. I could just go back and paste it all again, but now I just get -audacity-lock-user

So now it should be pretty obvious why we insist that you Export As WAV as often as you have room. Forget Saving. WAV files really are very high quality, uncompressed, stand-alone sound files that you can back up for safety and email to your mum if you wanted to.

Audacity Projects are brittle and they don't move well. We tell people they don't move at all because it's so hard to do.

<<<Why is the temp folder now empty? >>>

Do you have sudden Machine Insanity? How big is your hard drive and how much stuff do you have on it? People launch a long show in MP3 or Apple AAC format and are stunned when they find out how much room it takes when they open it in Audacity. In order to do editing, Audacity has to take the compression out. Your tiny, easily downloadable, stereo, hour-long show is now 750MB and have a happy day. If you do any production at all, cutting, fading, pasting, the production room could easily double.

As I think about this, one of the times you saved your show, Audacity may have assumed you wanted to start a new Project, so it obediently cleaned out the /temp folder for you.

Koz