How to piece .au files back together?

[Obinice]

Hey guys

I'm running the latest Audacity Beta on Vista (I wouldn't normally run a Beta of anything, but it was suggested the Beta would be better on Vista). I recorded a mic segment about 45 minutes long, saved the project, and then saved a copy of the project to protect the original while I worked on the copy.

I wanted to work on the copy on another machine so I transfered it across, but got a number of errors when I opened it, basically telling me that it couldn't find any of the .au files associated with the project. I went back and looked at the two projects on the original machine, and the same thing had happened even though I hadn't touched them. There are over 900 .au files, and I need to put them back in the right order so I can rebuild my project, but I haven't a clue how their file names are structured

Does anybody know how they're structured? It would take an extremely long painstaking time to try to figure out how all 944 pieces of the puzzle fit together, and I can't just go back and make the recording again. Thank you very much for your time folks!

A sample of the filenames is included below:
e000b0a0.au
e000b0a4.au
e000b0c4.au
e000b0d1.au
e000b0e1.au
e000b0f0.au
e000b1a8.au
e000b01b.au
e000b1be.au

P.S "e000b0a4.au" and "e000b0d1.au" link together in that order, but I don't understand why there's no order to the filenames.....

[Gale Andrews]

How did you save a copy of the project, with File > Save Project As? That's (in principle) the only safe way to do it. If you just made a copy in Explorer and called the .aup file something else, that will only work if you never make further changes to that project. See File Management Tips.

When you open the project and the errors are reported, how many files are missing, or how much of the waveform is silenced? If only bits of it are silenced that's probably an Audacity problem. If you had the two projects opened at once, that's a possible scenario for Audacity to put some of the .au files in the wrong _data folder, but we don't know exactly how it happens. So in that case you may simply be able to find the missing .au files in the _data folder of the other project and move them back (and repeat this if necessary for the other project). Choose the option to temporarily replace the missing files with silence (this session only) when you open the project, then Help > Show Log will show you the names of the missing files.

If you have to piece the data back together as it is, the files are randomly named, so they have to be sorted into timestamp order and then renamed into a consistent alphanumerical sequence while sorted by time. The Wiki Crash Recovery page tells you how to do that in the xplorer2 file manager. However doing this won't solve the problem if the files have got switched between the two projects.




Gale

[Obinice]

I don't recall exactly what happened at the time, but it's perfectly possible that I had two projects open at once and just didn't realise. The .au files were in the wrong folder. I should have checked for that, silly me. Everything's fixed now, thanks for the detailed reply!

....And I'll certainly be far more careful with Audacity in future.