Switching Quicktime Files to Audacity formats

[kristin_sytan]

Hi...

I'm having a problem with Audacity and I was wondering if anyone would be able to please help me out.

I conducted an interview for some research I am doing, and recorded the interview using Audacity. I replayed it after to see if it worked as I hoped. So far so good. That was less than 2 weeks ago.

I recently opened up the file, and for some reason the Audacity program was missing from my computer so I had to re-download Audacity. The problem now is that while I still have the data file for the interview, the Audacity file has gone missing (I downloaded the exact same version and it is replaying my other Audacity files fine). Instead I now have a data file with a million little Quicktime folders (all about 522KB to 1MB) that can only be played under Audacity. Is there anyway for me to compress all these little files into one big file so I don't have 2 second excerpts for my interview?

Am abit of a tech retard so appreciate any help you guys can give me.

Thanks!

[kozikowski]

The little files in the _data folder aren't strictly QuickTime files. They're little audio snippets in the form that Audacity uses to store Project content. Having the Project manager become damaged isn't all that unusual, but the way you damaged it is.

First things first. Audacity people wrote tools to recover a smashed show.

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

But I'm much more interested in why Audacity seemed to have vanished. That could be the signpost on the way to much more serious problems.

Go > Computer > Control-Click on your System Drive > Get Info.

That should tell you the maximum capacity of your hard drive and the amount you used. You should never use it all up and your Mac will start to create damage if the drive gets over 90% full. How big is yours and how full is it?

Koz

[kristin_sytan]

Hi. Thanks. I'm looking into recovering the file (hopefully).

I'm not entirely sure how the program disappeared. I could have accidently deleted it, but I highly doubt so. My hard drive is has 191GB available, with approximately 41GB used up, so there should be plenty of space.

[kozikowski]

You can delete the shortcut in the dock along the bottom. That doesn't delete the program. Go > Applications > Audacity (depending on how you installed it) and drag a new copy down to the dock.

Koz

[kozikowski]

<<<I conducted an interview for some research I am doing, and recorded the interview using Audacity. I replayed it after to see if it worked as I hoped. So far so good. That was less than 2 weeks ago.>>>

About that.

You said you played the interview back to see if it was OK, but you never said you saved it or did anything else. Audacity doesn't save sound files and it doesn't do anything unless you tell it to. At the end of the next interview, Export As WAV to get a nice, high quality sound file and create a copy on a USB thumb drive for safekeeping.

What you should be doing right now is reinstalling Audacity or any other sound program and opening up your regular WAV sound file of the show, or, if you can't find that, plug in the USB thumb drive and use the backup copy of the interview. Projects do not make good backups as they're difficult to copy or move.

Koz