Large Projects opened as empty projects

[PlanetariumHamburg]

Hello,

up until now I have used Audacity 1.3.12 beta on Windows 7 x64 without a problem. I recently ran multiple long-term recordings (in the dimension of 10 to 72 hours), saves the result as an AUP project and left audacity. When I now try to open these projects, Audacity processes the file for a while and then notes thousands of "unused" files that should be "safe to delete".

Unfortunaly neither option works for me: ignoring the files results in a project with one empty audio track, that is positioned at the right time (i.e. the time my recording ended) but without any audio content. The other option (the safe and recommended one, deleting unused files) results in the whole project audio data (i.e. the contents of the _data-folder) being deleted (which already ate several days of recordings).

Right now I'm stuck with the data files that cannot be recombined to a large file as there is no separate recovery tool to restore the project. Any advise and/or bugfixes are welcome

Thanks in advance
Dennis

[PlanetariumHamburg]

Update: found out that in fact none of the files referenced in the AUP file do exist on disk, those all have different names. Is it possible that there was some kind of mixup between writing the files and the AUP file?

[billw58]

Hmmm ... depending on the quality settings (32bit or 16bit) and whether the recordings are stereo or mono, a 10-hour recording could produce as many as 6000 .au files each 1 MB in size. A 72-hour recording would produce over 43000 files. It seems you have stress-tested either Audacity, your hard disk capacity, or your operating system.

What are you trying to record and why do you need to have it record for 72 hours? I ask because there may be better tools to do that job.

-- Bill

[PlanetariumHamburg]

I think I have about 70k files right now. These are raw long-term recordings of a SMPTE-timecode signal and I will probably switch to another tool for that; audacity was just the first choice because its an otherwise good, reliable tool. I'm still puzzled tough, why I have different sets of file names on disk and files referenced in the aup; and if this is a bug occuring on other systems, too...

[kozikowski]

You join a long list of people trying to make Audacity into a surveillance system.

My rule of thumb is personal involvement. If you can't possibly sit there with no breaks and watch the whole thing in real time, then Audacity may not be the program for you. That peels off all the seven and eight hour long recordings which become unstable due to computer limitations. 72 hour long programs fit into that description.

There's no theoretical limit to how long you can record, but there are certainly physical ones. How fragmented was your hard drive before you started and how much room do you have? Audacity will not run into a fragmented hard drive and you need, at minimum, four or five times the expected show size to be available -- oh, and your computer can't be doing anything else like checking for Windows Updates or Virus Scans. Windows machines come with Serious Baggage.

Koz