Audacity Forum

Hey...so I have Windows and I have no idea why but my Audacity randomly crashed before I saved my project. Nothing else crashed...but I closed the program, reopened it, and it asked me if I would like to recover my files and I, of course, hit yes. So now I have Audacity (Recovered) up and it has the time stamps in the right place, but it's all silence. What can I do to get the sound back?! I cannot find the temporary file that the wiki page said to find...so I don't know what to do at all. Please help!!!

gina.gresko wrote:Hey...so I have Windows and I have no idea why but my Audacity randomly crashed before I saved my project. Nothing else crashed...but I closed the program, reopened it, and it asked me if I would like to recover my files and I, of course, hit yes. So now I have Audacity (Recovered) up and it has the time stamps in the right place, but it's all silence. What can I do to get the sound back?! I cannot find the temporary file that the wiki page said to find...so I don't know what to do at all. Please help!!!

Sorry you had a problem. What three-digit version number of Audacity Beta are you using (see Help > About Audacity)? Were you recording when it crashed? In the current 1.3.13 Beta, Automatic Crash Recovery is generally very reliable.

If it was a recording, you did not edit it before the crash and you have left Audacity open without using File > Save Project, then you can use the Wiki Crash Recovery steps to recover the recording - with the proviso that a stereo recording may have some parts of the recording in the wrong channel. Again assuming you have never saved the project at any time, the data will be in the Audacity temporary folder - you can check the location of this at Edit > Preferences: Directories.

Before trying the steps on the Wiki Crash Recovery page, I suggest you use 1.3.13 if you are not already doing so and look at Help > Show Log. This will list the reported project errors. Hopefully files will be reported as "missing", but if you search the computer for them and put them back in the subfolder Audacity states in the log, you should get the audio back. If you are not using 1.3.13, force quit Audacity using Task Manager which will let you have another chance to recover it and see the log in 1.3.13. If you save the silent audio as a project, or quit normally without saving, you will not be able to get the audio content back again.




Gale