Audacity Forum

Audacity 1.13,10 (Beta); windows XP Home. Trying to make CD album; 6 music clips on 4 tracks. Tried to cut and paste one clip at a time; clips from 3 tracks to the 4th track. Highlited the first clip to move and used CTL X to cut. Cut clip disappeared as it should; moved cursor to where I wanted to paste in the 4th trrack and used ctl V for paste. The clip didn't appear, checked track display the clip was in and the clip & track wasn't there-seemed to disappear. Tryed the "undo" command and still no clip. Checked the other two tracks and they had disappeared also. Searched the display from top to bottom and out to 260 minutes and could not find anything.
I tried to move only one clip in one track and everything but the track I was trying move the clip to disappeared. Is this a program bug? Have to tell the paianist that 4 of her six songs are gone. These clips had been saved as audacity files and had not been exported yet. They are still shown in the "open" index but when commanded to "open" there is nothing there. What did I do wrong (have done this before successfully) and can I retreive the lost clips? HELP! When initially recording these tracks, each time the program selected a new track, it would skip down 4 or 5 empty tracks to record: is this normal? Makes finding the recorded track hard!
Rogers

No that's not normal. I've not seen Audacity do anything like that.

I don't know if it will fix these problems, but Audacity 1.3.11 is now out - it's basically the same as 1.3.10 with some fairly important bug fixes so it is recommended that you update. Having never come across this problem before I don't have any suggestions as to how you may be able to recover from it. Regarding how to prevent it from happening again:
Always Export a WAV format backup of important recordings as soon as you have the recording.
Ensure that you have plenty of free disk space at all times - Windows likes to have a minimum of 10% free space at all times.
Never move or rename project files or their data folders while you are working on them.
Check you hard drive for errors periodically and defragment the drive regularly (or at least check to see if it needs defragmenting).

If this problem persists after all the above, it may be worth thoroughly testing the RAM memory on your computer.