Audacity Not Recognizing .AUP

[NaniPopper]

using Audacity 2.0.6 on Windows 8.1 x64- after many weeks on a personal project that i've been having a blast tweaking and tinkering about, i was terrified when i opened it to find the error message in the attached picture below; from what i've read and compared to what i've been doing with my project, it seems to be from when i saved the project after using an online-converted mp3 with id3 v2 tags (or whatever?) in said project. now, i'm not getting typical error i see among posts>>> Error: reference to invalid character number in line #, as i've tried to open the .AUP with TextEdit to try some options from other posts to remove the strings/values between <tags> but all i get is the value NUL over and over and over again... all i want is to continue the enjoyment i was having. its 6:00 am now and after all the time i've spent on my project and drilling my head over it im pretty broken; any and all help would be insanely appreciated. like an idiot i didnt make a backup .wav or _data folder, oh and since the start of my project it's location/folder(s) etc no file has been physical moved v__v Basically... am I pooched? before i forget i've uploaded my .AUP (uploaded to free hosting site) and a .zip with it's corresponding _data folder if thats of any help

_data -> https://docs.google.com/uc?id=0B_wppQVe ... t=download

[kozikowski]

If you extinguish your .aup file after editing, that's pretty much the end of the world. There is no recovery other than possibly Windows step back tools.

We'll see what the others say.

We recommend multiple periodic backups, not just one, and don't damage older backups. Time and date work pretty well, but use the ISO version of date. 2015-01-26, not 1/26/15. There was a recent post from someone who did back up his work, but did it by continually stepping on older backups. He did one bogus backup of a damaged show and flushed the show and the single backup.

We also recommend Exporting the show as WAV file to guard against a corrupted Project.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

There is a permissions error opening the Google docs page. Perhaps you did not share the file or similar.

You could attach the AUP file ( http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 49&t=64936 ) but if it appears empty in a normal text editor like Notepad then there is nothing you can do. You can recover unedited recordings using only the AU files in the _data folder, but not projects where you were editing the data.

If the "FINAL.AUP" contains anything related to this work, you could try opening that.

Did Audacity or the computer crash when you closed and saved the project last time? Did you shut the computer down or put it to sleep before the project save was complete? The AUP file gets written last, so you must wait.


Gale

[NaniPopper]

hey thank you guys a tonne for getting back to me; and yea sorry about the Google Docs, that's one tangled up mess I gotta delve back into and change my privacy settings :s and yea just like you say it appears empty in a normal text editor like Notepad :/ and stupidly enough the FINAL.AUP is irrelevant... i'm a few nuggets short of a happy meal when it comes to my messes, despite my hard ocd. At the time I was so balls deep in my project that I became a bit naive with the Safety of it. it crashed quite often, but recovered perfectly everytime, and after pretty much every small edit I saved Project As, ofcourse not exporting once :/ My computer didnt crash but I did have to do a hard turn off at that time being, and forgot to mention when I rebooted and launched Audacity it was like the First time using it, welcome/getting started splashes etc. Really appreciate the feedback guys, i'm gonna get back into the swing of it but am using this a break in the meantime :3 Gonna be backing up everything out the wazoo from now on, thank you guys.

[kozikowski]

It's the OCDs that cause problems. They line up all the AUP files in one folder and all the _DATA folders in another. That's going to fail because AUP and _DATA have to be in the same folder to open the show.

We changed the default mode, but Audacity used to default to reference mode where it would go out and sample external sound files instead of making its own personal copies. The OCDs would finish a show and then "clean up" all the external sound files which would destroy the show.

Gonna be backing up everything out the wazoo from now on

Don't let your "O" do that, either. That takes time and you'll get tired of doing it and then stop. Set a kitchen timer and back up sane regular intervals like half-hour or hour or so.

Koz