No Sound, Fails to save and now recordings 'disappeared'

WIndows 10
Audacity 3.0.2

I set up the basis of a 2 hour radio show recording yesterday and saved it. Opened it this morning and got distracted with an emergency call for over an hour. Was sat looking at the PC all the while and could not see any problems. Tried to playback some of the tracks and no sound. Checked connections on the mixer, monitor speakers, which speakers were showing on Audacity, checked sound settings, checked sound from other apps - working fine.
Tried to close and reopen the AUP files as this used to be a fix on pervious version. Error message pops up ‘Audacity failed to write to a file’. I’ve checked disc volumes and tried to rename and re save in different locations. Still won’t save. Now I notice that most of the recordings on all of the tracks are now ‘blanc’ as if contains no audio. The ones that have a visible soundwave still won’t play any sound.

Is this due to me opening the work and not touching it for over an hour?

This could happen, for example, if your project is being stored on a network or cloud drive.

Tried to close and reopen the AUP files

As Jademan above and Audacity 3.0.2 doesn’t use AUP files. It uses AUP3 files. They’re much larger, contain the whole show, and don’t use a _DATA folder.

Not using network or cloud drives may seem like a silly, easily correctable shortcoming, but Audacity needs perfect, error-free, nearly real-time access to its drives to do some of its tricks such as music overdubbing and production latency correction.

It doesn’t look like it, but network connections all have collision detection, routing management, error processing, and resend scheduling. They’re not just ‘send something to the drive and go make coffee.’ Even home networks can do that. That’s what lets you watch Youtube, print a document, and do an app update all at the same time over one wire. If you’re wireless, it’s even worse.

Your virus protection software can cause that error if it thinks your work is foreign or evil.

And worse yet: Did you get a message that you can get your work back if you send Bitcoins to an address in war-torn Cypress?

Koz

Hey,
the only things different is me saving work in progress to an external hard drive, which gives the impression of speeding up things when working on Audacity. I can still access all older saved files but not the corrupt one. I put it down to experience and walked away.

I’ve used the D: drive on my laptop again to save the audacity work in progress and again today, after completing the basis of a two hour show, I saved and went to eat. On my return I get an error message, Cannot read from Drive, file is probably corrupt.

I’ve uninstalled Audacity, installed the latest one and still no joy. I back up to google drive so if you say this may be the root cause of the error messages, I’ll exclude the folder with Audacity files in it, to see if this stops it happening.

Would you know if this file is recoverable in anyway shape or form?

The Docker

Funny, I don’t recall ever seeing that message. Usually when the terms “probably corrupt” are put together, someone is referring to a politician. :wink:
But now I am alarmed to find some awkward looking Audacity documentation here: Error: Opening or reading file - Audacity Manual :frowning:
Regardless, it is sometimes best to take a screenshot, or failing that, to write down the message letter for letter, space for space, etc, perhaps as you did in your first post. :smiley:

There is no way to know for sure just by talking about it. But we can cut to the chase – if you care to zip up your .aup3 file and upload it to a file sharing service, then post (or PM me) a link, I’ll take a look at it.

Note that if you have already “recovered” your file and have nothing but “blank” tracks or if your .aup3 file size is only 320KB, then “Outlook not so good”

I’ve used the D: drive on my laptop

You have two drives on your laptop? Or you have a partition? If it’s partitioned, you don’t have “clean” drives in your machine. You have shared drives with a common spindle.

We’re finding any tricks like that or external drives are enough to cause file errors. A crowded spinning-metal hard drive can cause problems.

Some of that is understandable. You can’t do critically-timed overdubbing on a cloud drive. But some of this is beyond what you would expect.

The program developers know about this and I don’t know there’s a good solution until they post.

Mean time, we can wait for jademan to see if he can rescue your show.

It it highly recommended that you Export your raw recordings as perfect quality WAV (Microsoft) files before you do anything else.

Koz

Is your Audacity in English?

As Jademan, above, we work with limited information from many time zones away, so it’s not good to ad-lib or summarize error messages.

Google “Windows Snipping Tool.” That will let you draw a box around something and take a screenshot of it.

Scroll down from a forum text window > Attachments > Add Files.

Koz