Audacity crashed!!!

[alboy]

Audacity really annoyed me yesterday. I went to open a project file and I got messages coming up that there was a crash or bugs which resulted in lost data. This meant some of my tracks had just silence on them (the drum and the bass tracks). I went back to a much earlier copy of the project to see if I could pick the tracks up from there but these tracks were missing there too.

very strange. very puzzled. very frustrated.

Does anyone know why Audacity would crash? I had no prior warning and I thought the file was backed up automatically to avoid any potential disasters. Has this happened to anyone else?

[steve]

Are you absolutely certain that all audio files that were being used in the project still exist on your computer (in the same locations)?

By default, Audacity imports uncompressed files such as WAV or AIFF by reading them directly from the file. This is normal practice with media editors and both speeds up the import considerably and avoids the rapid consumption of disc space that copying the file would involve. However, this means that you need to keep the imported WAV or AIFF file available for Audacity to use in the exact file path it existed in when you imported it.

See here for more information: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... ement_Tips

[darobin]

Yes, here too.....after going well for a while,
now crashing consistently forcing a recovery of
tracks.

I'm using VISTA. . . .happening when trying
to import and / or save MONO or STEREO files
into mp3.

[alboy]

i always save my work when ive finished a session. ive never deleted an files to do with audacity. dont understand what happened.

[steve]

The safest form of backup is to export as WAV (multiple copies on different disks for really important stuff so as to also protect against hardware failure).

I went back to a much earlier copy of the project to see if I could pick the tracks up from there but these tracks were missing there too.

Was that one of the automatic backups? I have some doubts about the effectiveness of Audacity's backup strategy.

My prefered working method it to routinely save the project with a different file name (for example project001, project002, project003.....), and on longer important projects to occasionally export each track as a WAV (track1_001, tack2_001, track3_001.... then as: track1_002, tack2_002, track3_002.... )

This uses a lot of disk space, but only for the duration of the project, after which you export your finished show (plus backup) and delete all of the projects.

Fortunately crashes are far less common and automatic crash recovery much improved, but it is still very much worth being cautious.

For a production machine, using the latest and greatest beta version is not always the best choice. I still have a copy of Audacity 1.3.4 on my Windows computer because it is rock solid stable.

Running out of disk space on your C: drive is the ultimate project destroyer. Data gets lost and there is no recovery.