Audacity Forum

Hi

I recorded a large audacity project at a festival. The program did not crash or freeze, but ran properly from beginning to end. I saved the project correctly and upon trying to open it i received the following error message "Project check found 7316 Orphan blockfile(s). These files are unused and probably left over from a crash or some other bug. They should be deleted to avoid disk contention" This message is followed by three action options. However, the 7316 orphan .au's are infact the .au's for my project.. I was wondering if someone could help me with this issue..

Regards

steve

You seem to have been another victim of a nasty bug 137, that the developers have been having some trouble tracking down.

Any extra information that you can provide that lead to the crash can be helpful... Which exact version of audacity do you have? Which OS-X version? Please do not deleted the project or orphanated files.

I am running Version 1.3.13 - beta on a mac book pro with OSX 10.5.8..

As I stated previously, all the info seemed to save correctly in the session, and the project itself did not crash. I have all the .AU files but it will not reference to them. I also do not seem to be able to point the program towards them. Furthermore as the project saved fully I no longer have a temp file..

That a typical behaviour for bug 137. It's a somewhat rare bug and the developers haven't found yet a way of reproducing it, which unfortunately makes it very hard to track.

It's usually a good policy to also export a WAV file as a backup copy right after a recording is made. Most of the elves here do that as a normal procedure in their workflow.

I'm sorry you got caught by that known bug. The developers are working hard to fix it, but it has been a really nasty headache.

Audiophile021 wrote:I am running Version 1.3.13 - beta on a mac book pro with OSX 10.5.8..

As I stated previously, all the info seemed to save correctly in the session, and the project itself did not crash. I have all the .AU files but it will not reference to them. I also do not seem to be able to point the program towards them. Furthermore as the project saved fully I no longer have a temp file..

Sorry again for the bad experience.

How long was the recording and what was the project rate (bottom left of the screen)? Did you edit it?

7.3 GB is a lot of data. The description (the entire data being orphaned) sounds more like a known issue that you can't save projects that contain more than 2^31 samples (just over 13.5 hours at 44100 Hz, less at higher sample rates). See:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/w/index.ph ... ength#long
http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416

If it's bug 137 it's unusual for all the data to be orphaned - also the bug generally requires the project to have been edited or to have been open at the same time as other projects.

If it's a mono recording and you did not edit it, it should be perfectly recoverable in principle, but it needs some effort I'm afraid. You need to sort the .au files into timestamp order, then use a tool or script to rename the files while sorted by timestamp into some contiguous alphanumeric sequence like e0001.au, e0002.au... You can try automator to do the rename.

Then you will have to group the files into separate folders no larger than 2 GB (1 GB will be better). Having done that, you can use a recovery utility to recover the files in each folder to a single WAV file, then finally import each WAV into Audacity and cut and paste them together. For PPC Mac you the recovery utility you want is:
http://www.gaclrecords.org.uk/audacity_ ... sx_ppc.zip

For Intel Mac you want:
http://www.gaclrecords.org.uk/audacity_ ... _intel.zip.

More details on this process are at http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/CrashRecovery .

When pieced together, export, but bear in mind that for most applications the file size limit for WAV or AIFF is 2 GB (some applications will accept 4 GB). If you need a single complete lossless file, you could try exporting as FLAC, but it won't play on iTunes.

If your recording was stereo, you will probably find that the left and right channel will be transposed here and there after recovery - if so, that would have to be manually fixed by listening.

Do feel free to attach the project .aup file in any case, and we will see what we can deduce from it. You can use "Upload attachment" underneath the message "Preview/Submit" buttons to do that .



Gale