Orphan blockfiles when opening saved project

[mikewitney]

Untitled-2.jpg (122.51 KiB) Viewed 436 times

hi i have just recordrd a non stop 48 hour dj show i split it in to 2 X 24 hour recordings
when i try to open the first one i get the above error....
help what can i do

i was trusted to record this show and it looks like ive failed

[Gale Andrews]

What was the project rate? Open the .aup in Notepad, turn word wrap off and look for "rate" near the top of the file, at the end of the line starting with "<project xmlns=". Unless the rate was as low as 22050 Hz or so (which it doesn't look like given the number of files) you recorded longer than Audacity can cope with stored as a project. At the default project rate of 44100 Hz, the storage limit is just over 13.5 hours. This is explained here:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Recording_length#long

and will be mentioned in the Release Notes for the next 1.3.14 Beta.

If you have exported any backup wav files before closing the project, please use those.

If not, you have a big job I'm afraid, because although the audio is in the project, Audacity cannot access it .

All you can do is open each subfolder in the _data folder for the project, sort the 256 .au files in there by timestamp order, then rename them into some consistent alphanumerical sequence (like b001.au through b256.au) while the files are time-sorted. Then you can recover the WAV for that subfolder using the 1.2 recovery tool which will turn the 256 .au files into one WAV. See:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Crash ... very_tools

You could also copy and paste the .au files from the subfolders into a new large folder (best not to exceed about 1500 .au files) and sort/rename/recover in the same way.

This process should work well if it was a mono recording, but if it was a stereo recording as I suppose, the channels may be transposed here and there and would have to be manually edited. If you had edited the recording before saving the project, the order of the audio in the recovered file will be more incorrect again.

Sorry I can't offer better news than that.


Gale