Audacity Forum

Hi Everybody. I am totally new here. First off I really appreciate all of you who try to help people with their problems. I have version 2.1.1 on Win XP SP3. Couple of days ago for the tenth time my Audacity crashed with no reason and I had to use Task Manager to end it with the hope that I can recover so many open projects, like all other times ! BUT unfortunately this time something strange happened, Some of projects were recovered and some didn't !!! I mean some of them just open a blank audacity windows !!

AND BESIDES THAT, the last recorded file and the most important one, CAN NOT BE OPENED !! I got a fully blanked window !!! BUT not just a normal Audacity blank window like the others !! Plz Look at screenshot to see what I've got ?!? (the rightmost window is the last one !!)

AND the more interesting, when I try to open a new project, nothing happens !!! (Actually windows shows there's "another" opened window, but when you click on that, nothing happens !!!)

I checked the Audacity folder and the folders and files are there. I checked the Autosave folder and as you can guess, some of the autosave files are 0 kb !! I really need your help because these files are really vital for me and I have to make an clip in 2 days. PLEASE GIVE ME AB STEP BY STEP ADVISE for I am not an expert in Audacity.

I am not sure but this problem could have happened because my HDD was showing full at that moment (because of some malware which I got rid of that). Even though I don't believe this is the cause of problem, cause I had this problem couple more times in the same day but ALL project were fully recovered.

PLEASE I NEED SERIOUS HELP ASAP. THANK YOU SO MUCH IN ADVANCE ! I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOUR ADVISES IMPATIENTLY !

There are risks in running XP connected to the internet. Please see the following page for what you can do to make the machine (a little) more secure if you can't update to later Windows:
http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 46&t=84123.

You cannot use Audacity with no disk space. Do you mean you had disk space but the malware was misrepresenting the free disk space?

If you did have sufficient disk space, Audacity should not be freezing that often. Do you do anything in particular that makes the freeze happen?

If the same projects or recovered projects were always freezing, the best approach is to export all projects as separate WAV files, then restart Audacity. Import the first WAV, save as a new project. File > Close, import the next WAV, save as a new project, and so on.

If any AUTOSAVE files are empty then the only chance is to force quit Audacity in Task Manager and use the "1.2 Recovery Utility" to piece together the temporary data for each project. This only works if these are unedited recordings, otherwise the timestamps of the files no longer match their position on the Timeline. The Instructions are at http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/reco ... ually.html.

Note that because you are not using the current 2.1.2 version of Audacity, your default Audacity temporary folder will not be as stated on that page but at C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Local Settings\Temp\audacity-temp.


Gale

Hi. Thanks Gale, Sorry I could not get back to you earlier, because I had a surgery and I was in Hospital for 3 weeks. I tried what you said but it did not solve my problem because there's absolutely NOTHING I can do with Audacity right now !!!
In response to your question, If there was no actual space on Hard drive, the file would not be stored, But as I said all the .au files are there, BUT "some of" Autosave files are corrupted, and that's why Audacity can not open them. AND YES, even when I had a lot of disk space, Audacity was freezing so many times !! But It's another issue that I can explain the situations when It freezes, in another post in detail, right now I am SOOO frustrated because I LITERALLY CAN NOT DO ANYTHING WITH AUDACITY RIGHT NOW !!! I CAN NOT RECOVER MY VERY IMPORTANT PROJECTS, I CAN NOT OPEN A NEW PROJECT !!! AND I CAN NOT EVEN OPEN ANY OF .AU FILES !!!! I AM SUPER PISSED OFF NOW !!! COULD ANYONE PLZ COME UP WITH A PRACTICAL SOLUTION ?!?

Sorry to hear you were in hospital, I home you are recovering from that now.

There is no way to repair empty (0 kB) AUTOSAVE files and there is no automated way to piece together their data unless they were unedited recordings.

What I would suggest is to force quit Audacity in Task Manager then recover the projects that have AUTOSAVE files larger than 0 kB, one at a time. To do that, rename the extensions of all the AUTOSAVE files except the one you currently want to recover. For example, give all the others ".auto" extension. Then launch Audacity and it will recover only the project with .autosave extension.

If the recovered waveform looks correct, export it as WAV, and optionally, save it as a project.

If the recovered waveform is flat or empty, your only choice is to force quit Audacity in Task Manager, and then if it's an unedited recording, try the 1.2 Recovery Utility I mentioned before. If it's not an unedited recording, your only choice is to drag in the AU files by hand and attempt to rearrange them.

Once you have the first project recovered, you can rename the others larger than 0 kB back to .autosave extension then open them one at a time using File > Open... .




Gale