A large portion of audio missing in a file

[audacityfanboy]

I have a problem with a few files i created with audacity. I was recording with microphone. Normaly about 4 hours of recording was about 2 gb of space when i produced it. But the file i am talking about only give about 20 minutes at this size .... i am sure the sound was recorded, i guess something must have gone wrong when i was saving the file to my computer ... soo what can i do, is it possible to save all this audio data that is hidden ? Literaly hours are missing ... 20 minutes doesnt take a lot of disk space ... soo what is the rest of the data in the file ?

[DVDdoug]

There is some information about Audacity's AUP & data files here. (Hopefuly all of the audio is there, but someone else will have to help you "recover" if you can't open your AUP file, or if you didn't save your project.)

Normaly about 4 hours of recording was about 2 gb of space when i produced it. But the file i am talking about only give about 20 minutes at this size ....

That depends on your bitrate, which for uncompressed formats depends on sample rate, bit depth, and number of channels. It's not "easy", but a 20 minute, 32-bit, 192kHz, stereo file is nearly 2GB.

WAV files are limited to 2GB (some applications allow up to 4GB), but this does not affect the Audacity "raw" files, it's only an issue when you export to WAV.

[audacityfanboy]

Thank you for your reply ...

This are all same files, being saved the same way, soo there is lost audio for sure .. where there is only 20 minutes, should be like 4 hours ... even opening it with adobe audition, it says there is morethen 100 mb of non audio data that will not be processed. Soo there is extra audio data but needs to be recovered somehow. I sadly dont have any files exept this .wav

[Gale Andrews]

If you exported it as WAV (Microsoft) signed 16-bit PCM, stereo and the project rate was 44100 Hz then 3 hours 20 minutes is about as long as you will get for 2 GB file size. You should not go over 2 GB unless you know your operating system and audio player can play WAV up to 4 GB.

Have you tried File > Import > Raw Data for this faulty file? Choose the correct encoding, channels and sample rate (same as the project rate you exported at). After import, you will need to zoom in at the start and delete a little click which is the WAV headers of the file.

If that works, export as two WAV files instead of one.

Note that I "think" if you choose "Other uncompressed files" when you export, click "Options..." then choose "RF64(RIFF64)" for header and your choice of encoding, there is then no 2 GB/4 GB size limit. The "Signed 16-bit PCM" encoding choice would be very much like WAV (Microsoft) signed 16-bit PCM except that there is no size limit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF64 .

Whether your operating system or audio player can play that file is another matter, though it should be valid whatever the size.


Gale

[audacityfanboy]

It worked ! I just imported as RAW and got my 7 hours of audio back. Thank you soo much ! )

[Gale Andrews]

Thanks for letting us know.

But if it was seven hours, you may want to export as three files if you are exporting as WAV.


Gale