Audacity Forum

I saved a multitrack recording in Audacity 1.3.8 and when I went to open it later all the data was gone. (It just showed all the tracks data as a flat line). All the tracks are saved in the data folder as 6 sec. clips of audio. How do put all the data back to together for each track? The song has like 12 tracks and the song is about 4:00 long. Some of the tracks are in stereo and some were in mono. I read the audacity help page and I don't under stand what they want me to do. It said:

Automatic recovery tools
A few tools have been written which can automate data recovery.
Note: all these utilities require the .au files to be input in consecutive number order. This should normally be the case if recovering data from Audacity 1.2.x. If you have to recover data from 1.3.x, the files will not be in consecutive number order and they will need to be made such.
If the files need to be renumbered for any reason, open Audacity's temporary or project _data folder in your system file manager, and resort the .au files by time modified. They then need to be renamed using a numeric sequence whilst they are sorted by time modified. An arrangement looking something like this should work:
b001.au 15:56:02
b002.au 15:56:02
b003.au 15:56:10
b004.au 15:56:10

There is a lot of data to put back together and Just don't understand how to put all the 6 sec. sound files together for each track? All help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

T

paintmonster1 wrote:I saved a multitrack recording in Audacity 1.3.8 and when I went to open it later all the data was gone. (It just showed all the tracks data as a flat line). All the tracks are saved in the data folder as 6 sec. clips of audio. How do put all the data back to together for each track? The song has like 12 tracks and the song is about 4:00 long. Some of the tracks are in stereo and some were in mono. I read the audacity help page and I don't under stand what they want me to do. It said:

Automatic recovery tools
A few tools have been written which can automate data recovery.
Note: all these utilities require the .au files to be input in consecutive number order. This should normally be the case if recovering data from Audacity 1.2.x. If you have to recover data from 1.3.x, the files will not be in consecutive number order and they will need to be made such.
If the files need to be renumbered for any reason, open Audacity's temporary or project _data folder in your system file manager, and resort the .au files by time modified. They then need to be renamed using a numeric sequence whilst they are sorted by time modified. An arrangement looking something like this should work:
b001.au 15:56:02
b002.au 15:56:02
b003.au 15:56:10
b004.au 15:56:10

There is a lot of data to put back together and Just don't understand how to put all the 6 sec. sound files together for each track?

You are using an out-of-date Beta. The more out-of-date the version you use, the more likely you will receive problems. The current 1.3.12 Beta is here:
http://audacityteam.org/download/beta_mac

The Crash Recovery page says what you have to do (sort the files by timestamp, earliest first,then rename them while they are sorted like that, lowest number first). I am not on a Mac so I can't tell you exactly how to do it. Maybe someone on Mac can tell you if Finder can do a Mass Rename according to an alphanumeric sequence.

If the data is inside multiple folders then it may be best to recover each folder separately, in which case it does not matter if you use the same sequence in each folder.




Gale

Thanks for the response... I have now downloaded the the current version 1.3.12 ... So the next question is how do I sort the files by time stamp?

T

You can use Apple's Automator utility to sort and rename files. Duplicate the "_data" folder before you start, then work on the copy. The steps needed are Ask for Finder Items, Get Folder Contents, Sort Finder Items, and Rename Finder Items. I've not done this myself, and have not tried the automatic recovery tools on a 1.3.x project. Good luck, and let us know how you get on.

-- Bill

Well, I just tried this. Duplicated the _data folder from an LP capture and ran an Automator script to rename files sequentially after sorting by date created. audacity_recovery (PPC version) terminates with this error message:

"audacity_recovery Error
An unexpected error has occurred during execution of the main script

ValueError: invalid literal for int(): 0006a87"

-- Bill

Something else occurs to me ... the recovery tools seem to assume that the creation date/time of the file corresponds to its position in the time line. This would not necessarily be the case if any editing had been done to the project.

And ... in Audacity 1.3.x the _data folder contains a folder that contains multiple folders that contain the audio files. The recovery tool assumes that the selected folder contains audio files, so it is necessary to recover each of those folders separately. Or perhaps one could move all the audio files into one folder then recover that folder?

I did the latter with my vinyl-capture test file. Since the recovery tool did not work, I recovered files in pairs (since the capture was stereo). Ignoring the noise bursts from the waveform-display data at the head of each file, it was obvious that the files were not in playback-order.

So I started over, and renamed the files in each sub-folder separately, then started importing the files. The results were similar. Furthermore, there seems to be no guarantee that, for example, b0003.au and b0004.au (after renaming) represented portions of the L and R channels respectively of the same time segment.

My conclusion (after these admittedly brief tests) is that the recovery tools will only work reliably when recovering from a crash during recording, and will not help if any editing has been done.

-- Bill

I think I largely agree with your conclusions Bill, though I never really tested this much. Clearly everyone thought the crash recovery utilities would be redundant for 1.3.

I certainly know someone on Mac who recovered an unedited stereo recording from 1.3 quite well using the recovery utility. This had never been saved as a project, and the Audacity Crash Recovery dialogue that you get on opening 1.3 after a crash had presented him with silence. The Wiki crash recovery utility did recover some .au files into the wrong channel, but the playback order was correct.

I suspect like you that once you edit the recording, the timestamp order no longer relates to the order of the .au files on the timeline because of the undo mechanism. You can see that if you make an edit, look at the .au files with the timestamp of that edit, then import those files into Audacity - as well as the files related to the edit, there will be files that appear to be related to the state before the edit. Saving the project merely perpetuates that ordering.

Plus of course if your 1.3 project was an imported file that you can't recover for some reason, the timestamps of many of the .au files will be identical, so the crash recovery utilities will never recover that correctly even after timestamp ordering and renaming. They should do so perfectly from a 1.2 project though.

So a mono, unedited recording looks like all that the crash recovery utilities can cope with from a 1.3 project. Anyway, I added a mention of Automator to the Wiki crash recovery page.

@paintmonster1, this may not be painting a very optimistic picture for you. One thing you could do is to open the project in 1.3.12 and click Help > Show Log. That should list any errors Audacity found opening the project. Then make a copy of the .aup file to be safe, and open it in a text editor and compare the file names of each "waveblock" to see if they have a corresponding filename in the _data folder. If the log shows errors, search the .aup file for those files and look at the names of those files.

Also do you have multiple folders inside the _data folder, such as "d01" to "d06" inside the "e00" folder? The fourth numeric character in the filename of the .au file (for example, a 5 in a file named e0005932.au) should tell you that e0005932.au is in the "d05" folder (according to the .aup file). So if it was actually in the "d06" folder, moving it to the "d05" folder would restore it. I'm not saying that has happened but it could have done. Equally there could be some simple misnaming of the files .

Before you spend any more time on it, you may want to drag say a dozen of the .au files at random from the _data folder into Audacity. I hope they won't be absolute silence but if they are, then there is nothing useful to recover.




Gale

Bill and Gale,

Thank you so much for all your time and effort. I down loaded the latest version of audacity and I've had no crashes and lost no data. Also I've now backed up all my data on my Mac so if future crashes happen I will at least have the edited files. (Lesson learned about backing up data!) Considering all you've said, I think I'll just move forward... This was a huge multi-track recording I made with my Boss-Br900 recorder so I'll just export the original files back into audacity and try to redo all the edits.

Thanks again for the assistance!

My Best to both of you,

paintmonster1