Project displays waveforms, yet there is no sound

[dragos]

Hi, everyone. A friend imported a wav file into Articulate, played it in Articulate and it sounded fine, then saved the project. Then, because he was running out of space, he had to delete the original file and he was relying on the Articulate project to bail him out. Now we can open the project and we see the waveforms, but when trying to play it, there is no sound.

Do you have any advice as to why this may be happening? Many thanks in advance!

[kozikowski]

Articulate Studio? Or do you mean Audacity?

If you did all that in Audacity, you have no show. Audacity Projects do not save audio. They "point" to other audio files. The file your project was pointing to was that original sound file. Without that, no show.

The only way you would have had to produce a finished show would have been to Export As WAV... which would have run into your original space problem.

So no matter what you did, you had too small a machine to produce a finished show. If not now, then later on, you would have had a show crash from space limitations.

Koz

[dragos]

Man, long day yesterday - yes, I meant Audacity and not Articulate. Thanks a lot for ready between the lines and replying: although the audio is gone, it's very useful to know there is a good reason for it.

Many thanks again!

[leecappella]

Not having sound after recording a project for first time user like me is not good. How can I get sound from my project once I've exported to wave? Thanks.

[kozikowski]

<<<Not having sound after recording a project for first time user like me is not good. >>>

Pretty much the exact words I used to try and get the programmers to change it. This burns an enormous number of people.

<<<How can I get sound from my project once I've exported to wave?>>>

The Project and the Export are two different things.

When I capture a live performance, I Export As WAV... immediately and often. At the end of a day, I may have ten or twenty different Windows WAV sound files on my hard drive. Then I make safety copies of each one and then sometimes even more copies which I deliver to the client.

Then, during the edit session, I open each WAV file, populate the timeline and edit my brains out. I Save Project As... and Save Project during the edit session as I feel like it. At lunch and then again at the end of the day, I Export As WAV... to get safety "backup" points in case of failure.

At the very end of the show, I Export As WAV... and give that to the client on whatever device/drive/web site they want. Then I go back and clean up many but not necessarily all the WAV files in the middle. They go into an archive in case the client changes their mind. Practically speaking, I almost never destroy the original capture WAV files--or I wait years to do it. I still have two year old original live performance WAV files I'm trying to decide whether to keep or not. With those WAV files, I or anyone else can recreate the edit--or any other edit as they wish.

Please note that Audacity Projects are almost irrelevant to all this. They're nice in the middle of the process because they let you back up if you make a bad edit or decision, but a lot of that vanishes when you close Audacity. If you don't have all those WAV sound files around, it's really easy to edit your way out of a show and no way of recovering without shooting the performance again.


Too many people capture a live performance, "Save" it as a project, edit it, and just before producing the final show, some little, teensy thing goes wrong and they flush days of work down the toilet. Everything from the original live captures to the edit list to the final show vanishes in a cloud of sparkling AU files which can't be put back together again, ever.

Koz