Norton causes project audio to disappear[SOLVED]

[steve]

It usually saves the project.
Sometimes it doesnt.

I'm trying to visualise this - You are making a 5 hour recording of bird song, and when you press the Stop button your computer explodes....

[kozikowski]

Have you seen this Happen any where else?

No, but you did come up with a squirrelly problem. Computer file management can get seriously Twilight Zone when you start using unacceptable characters in the filenames. 1/9/13. That's not today's date. That's a file called 13 inside a folder called 9 inside a directory called 1. And your computer will try to create that structure for you.

I don't remember the response to the soundfile reference technique suggestion. That can totally give you a show with large missing pieces or silent stretches. We look for Obsessives trying to do music mixes. They get to the end of a reference type show and then "clean out and neaten up" all those messy sound files and destroy their show in the process.

I don't think there is any set of conditions on a healthy machine that can cause your symptoms, so either you are trying to convert Audacity to a surveillance recorder, a very popular but usually unsuccessful effort, or your computer is unhappy for any of a number of reasons. I'm fuzzy on this, but I think the Project limit using the default Audacity sound settings is 13 hours, but even if you exceed that, all it does is start over. You don't get random gaps in the show.

Random gaps in an otherwise healthy show almost always means you moved the wrong music files at the wrong time.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

Not necessarily. You can use a short form:
Numbers, Upper and Lower Case Letters and Underscore or Hyphen from the same key.

I had to think a little about what that meant, reading it cold.

How about the short-form being "You can use numbers, upper and lower case letters and the key that produces underscore or hyphen-minus."

I think we should say "hyphen-minus" anyway, to distinguish from Unicode hyphen.


Gale

[Gale Andrews]

Have you seen this Happen any where else?

No, but you did come up with a squirrelly problem. Computer file management can get seriously Twilight Zone when you start using unacceptable characters in the filenames. 1/9/13. That's not today's date. That's a file called 13 inside a folder called 9 inside a directory called 1. And your computer will try to create that structure for you.

How? Windows would not allow a file to be saved with forward slashes in the file name.


Gale

[Gale Andrews]

So, your thinking that the use of ( /) symbols when attempting to save a file will cause random sections of the project to dissapear and or make it saveable sometimes while unsaveable other times?

Of course not. You will just see an error that the file name is not valid.

Also note that what Koz said about "make a copy" only applies to importing uncompressed files like WAV or AIFF, not to recording. It's irrelevant if you are only recording, in which case the full data is copied into the project.

Anyone else have an answer

There is an occasional random problem that Audacity won't save to an xml project file (which could be the autosave unsaved changes file or an actual AUP file). I have only ever seen it happen myself with autosave files.

If it happens, I suggest you always export to WAV instead. If you have a label track, you can export that too.

Do you have multiple projects open at a time? There is a longstanding but almost-never-happens bug that Audacity can move data around between projects that are open. So you will have missing audio data block files in one project, and orphaned block files in the project that the data was moved to.

Do you actually see "missing audio data block files" error messages when you load the project and find it has audio missing? If you see that error, don't choose to silence the audio.

Is the audio missing (shorter length that it should be) or correct length but a flat line where the audio should be?

Is there any chance the AU files in the temporary or project _data folder are getting moved or deleted by some other program? Edit > Preferences, choose Directories. Where is the Audacity temporary directory? Do you have permanent permission to write there?

How long are the recordings and what project rate? Note that you can't have tracks longer than just over 13.5 hours at 44100 Hz track rate, or the whole project will reopen "orphaned". The limit is shorter at higher rates. That issue will be fixed in the next 2.0.6 release.

Anyway, if the save error happens again, leave the project open, export your tracks, then open Help > Show Log... and save the log file. Attach the log to your post. Please see here for how to attach files: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 49&t=64936 .


Gale

[steve]

Anyone else have an answer or seen anything like this?

I've seen data disappear when the project being worked on or the temporary folder are on a network drive. Are you using a network drive? You have still told us very little about what you are actually doing and we can't see over your shoulder so we can only guess.

[kozikowski]

I think we should say "hyphen-minus" anyway, to distinguish from Unicode hyphen.

OK, but....
Correct me, but unless you go to extraordinary effort, there's only two characters on a keyboard that look anything like "-". Lower case Underscore and Numeric Keyboard Minus. Most people would not naturally reach for the numeric keyboard to hyphenate "Simon Bar-Sinister" -- few people are expecting to subtract "Sinister" from "Bar" -- and certainly wouldn't go through holding ALT and Shift and whatever else you need to press to achieve the extended Unicode/ASCII character set.

I suspect we could count the number of people that managed to slip an "en-dash" into a filename by accident on no hands.

Koz

[Theophilus20]

So, your thinking that the use of ( /) symbols when attempting to save a file will cause random sections of the project to dissapear and or make it saveable sometimes while unsaveable other times?

Of course not. You will just see an error that the file name is not valid.

Also note that what Koz said about "make a copy" only applies to importing uncompressed files like WAV or AIFF, not to recording. It's irrelevant if you are only recording, in which case the full data is copied into the project.

Anyone else have an answer

There is an occasional random problem that Audacity won't save to an xml project file (which could be the autosave unsaved changes file or an actual AUP file). I have only ever seen it happen myself with autosave files.

If it happens, I suggest you always export to WAV instead. If you have a label track, you can export that too.

I usually make an attempt to Export it in a different format if it doesnt save into the file folder i have created for it initally. This has never worked.

Do you have multiple projects open at a time? There is a longstanding but almost-never-happens bug that Audacity can move data around between projects that are open. So you will have missing audio data block files in one project, and orphaned block files in the project that the data was moved to.

No, only one project open at a tine.

Do you actually see "missing audio data block files" error messages when you load the project and find it has audio missing? If you see that error, don't choose to silence the audio.

No, I have never seen this error message that i can remember

Is the audio missing (shorter length that it should be) or correct length but a flat line where the audio should be?

The missing audio is the correct length, but, there appears a flat line in the sections of audio that "Disappears". I can watch the audio being created, and never see anything that would indicate something has happened. But, when i go to save it, a large portion of audio is now a flat line.

Is there any chance the AU files in the temporary or project _data folder are getting moved or deleted by some other program? Edit > Preferences, choose Directories. Where is the Audacity temporary directory? Do you have permanent permission to write there?

I dunno

How long are the recordings and what project rate? Note that you can't have tracks longer than just over 13.5 hours at 44100 Hz track rate, or the whole project will reopen "orphaned". The limit is shorter at higher rates. That issue will be fixed in the next 2.0.6 release.

The projects are anywhere between 45min to 1hr and 15min

Anyway, if the save error happens again, leave the project open, export your tracks, then open Help > Show Log... and save the log file. Attach the log to your post. Please see here for how to attach files: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 49&t=64936 .

I will try this and report back the next time it happens


Gale

[kozikowski]

The missing audio is the correct length, but, there appears a flat line in the sections of audio that "Disappears". I can watch the audio being created, and never see anything that would indicate something has happened. But, when i go to save it, a large portion of audio is now a flat line.

Just to go over this again, when you create the show, the red sound meters bounce merrily and the blue waves pile up on the timeline absolutely as normal, right? You can Stop and then play several parts of the show as a quality control measure and everything plays just fine, yes?

Then File > Save Project, turn off the machine and go to bed. When you open the Project in the morning, that's when you discover parts of the show have flat-lined? You suggest in several places Audacity records holes in the show and I don't think that's what's happening. I think there some damage in the save process.

But I can't think what.

The machine has no network connection.....

And occasionally, the machine will fail to save anything at all? What are the messages when it does that? Can you see the Hard Drive light and is it flashing madly when the save fails?

Do you ever turn off the machine? Do you have the machine set to check memory when it wakes up? That may be a good idea until we figure out what's happening.

Did you build the machine? Did you turn on the hard drive failure feature? Did you do a drive inspection at any time? Start > My Computer > C: > Properties > Error Test. I'm doing that from fuzzy memory.

Was the machine ever connected on line? Does it have virus protection?

Koz

[steve]

Theophilus20, is this what happens:

You save a project and close Audacity.
Next day or some time later you try to open the project (how? Do you open Audacity and go to "File > Open..." and select the .aup file, or some other method?)
An error message pops up and you dismiss the message.
The project opens and there are portions of the project that show a flat line instead of the proper waveform.