Audacity randomly deleting some of my audio

[Elin]

Hi, new forum member here. I looked at the sticky posts, but didn't find my problem addressed.

I've happily used Audacity for years for editing amateur audiobooks. I record on an external device and later import the .wav files into Audacity for editing. Today I opened a project I hadn't worked on for a week or so. I had been done with all the editing, but now I found that much of the audio was randomly gone. It would end randomly in the middle of a sentence and be blank (that is, the waveform was flat and I heard nothing if I listened to it) for some space of time, and then come back, and then disappear again, etc. The length of the project is the same, but it's like the waveforms were completely flattened randomly throughout the whole project. I hadn't moved any of the original .wav files from the folder, and they're unharmed--if I import one of them again they look the same as they originally did.

Luckily I'd already exported this project to mp3, but I'd had it prooflistened and found a couple of things I wanted to change, so I was very annoyed. If I want to do that, it looks like I'll have to edit the whole thing again from scratch. Unless anyone knows a way to fix it?

I use Audacity 1.3.11 on Windows Vista.

[steve]

Audacity 1.3.11 is a little out of date now. Although I don't think this is related to the problem (at the moment), it is worth updating to 1.3.13 (just install it over the top of your current installation). http://audacityteam.org/download/

Was the Audacity Project made from one long (imported) audio file, or a number of different files?
Was the Project stored on an internal hard drive or somewhere else?
Were there any error messages when you opened the Project?
When you work with Audacity Projects, do you work with just one project open at a time, or with multiple projects open simultaneously?
Roughly how long is the Project, and roughly how much is missing?
Is this a one-off problem or does it keep happening?

[Elin]

I installed 1.3.13, and it did give me a clue. When I tried to open the project, it told me that it was missing external files (1.3.11 never gave me this warning message). Now that I think about it, I have recently moved the whole folder where I keep the sub-folders with my different Audacity projects, but I didn't think it would be a problem, since the aup file was still in a folder with all the external files belonging to that project--I mean, their relative locations are the same. Seems like this could be the problem, though.

Anyway, it gives me three options:

- close project immediately with no changes
- treat missing audio as silence (this session only)
- replace missing audio with silence (permanent immediately)

It also says that for the second option, the waveform may not show silence. Could this be what happened, although 1.3.11 didn't tell me so? Anyway, I chose the first option for now.

Don't know if your questions are still relevant, but here are the answers anyway.

Was the Audacity Project made from one long (imported) audio file, or a number of different files?

13 different files, about 5-20 minutes each.

Was the Project stored on an internal hard drive or somewhere else?

Internal hard drive.

Were there any error messages when you opened the Project?

No.

When you work with Audacity Projects, do you work with just one project open at a time, or with multiple projects open simultaneously?

Just one.

Roughly how long is the Project, and roughly how much is missing?

It's about one and a half hours long, and at least half of it was missing.

Is this a one-off problem or does it keep happening?

It's happened to me once before, a year or two ago. But I had a lot of other stuff going on then and didn't have the energy to find out what was going on. And hmm, I wonder now if I had moved the whole project folder that time, too, although I can't remember.

[steve]

I have recently moved the whole folder where I keep the sub-folders with my different Audacity projects, but I didn't think it would be a problem, since the aup file was still in a folder with all the external files belonging to that project--I mean, their relative locations are the same.

That's probably the problem.
When you "record" with Audacity, the data is put into the _data folder. The default behaviour in Audacity 1.3.11 was that when you "Import" a file, Audacity will (depending on the settings in "Preferences" and the type of file) try to read the file directly and not copy the data, thus the Project depended on that audio file existing in exactly the same location. Audacity uses a "relative address" for the _data folder (it must be in the same folder as the .AUP file) but it uses "absolute addresses" for external files. These files are called "Dependencies" and if they were in C:myfoldersomeotherfolderabouthere when you created the Audacity Project, then Audacity will always look for those dependencies in C:myfoldersomeotherfolderabouthere.

Do you remember exactly where the project was before you moved it? If you can move it back there (safest to make a copy of the whole thing and move that) then the project will hopefully work again.

See here for more information, and please ask if you have further questions about this or get stuck. http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Audacity_Projects

[Elin]

Do you remember exactly where the project was before you moved it? If you can move it back there (safest to make a copy of the whole thing and move that) then the project will hopefully work again.

Yay, this worked! Thank you so much for the help.