Missing audio after crash

Audacity crashed and when I re-opened, I got a window telling me that orphan block files were found. It said “these files are unused by this project”, so I chose “Delete orphan files”, which I realize may not have been the best thing, but I did. The project opened and all the edits are there as before, but the files now appear ghosted and show no wave form in them and play no sound. It looks like the project has lost it’s references to the original audio files. How can I fix this?
Screen Shot 2018-07-01 at 4.41.41 PM.png

Audacity has the ability to work in reference mode where instead of making its own personal copies of music files for editing, it points to them on the fly as they are needed. Audacity gets smaller and much faster when you do that, but the health of your project is now sprinkled across multiple other files—and you have to remember you did that.

Is that what you did?

What were you doing when it crashed?

What’s the show? Editing the CD for a Rock Band?

The data folder is there and it’s 400mb, so it clearly has the audio files in it, they just are not connecting with the project for some reason. Audacity crashed because it froze and then I force quit it. When I reopened, I had the problem. The source files otherwise are right there in the same folder anyway, not sprinkled anywhere else.

The data folder is there and it’s 400mb, so it clearly has the audio files in it, they just are not connecting with the project for some reason. Audacity crashed because it froze and then I force quit it. When I reopened, I had the problem. The source files otherwise are right there in the same folder anyway, not sprinkled anywhere else.

Using Mac El Capitan and Audacity 2.2.2

This is a Project.

The AUP file has the instructions of what to do with the stuff in the _DATA folder. You need them both. Is that what you have? No AUP file?

If this is a raw performance with no editing at all, you might be able to rescue some of the show manually.

Manual crash recovery is near the bottom.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recovery.html

If this is an edited show, that’s the end of the world. There is no recovery without the AUP file.

Koz

No, I have the AUP file and the data folder. The AUP file opens just fine, but without the audio playing, as pictured in the original post. As I say, it’s as if it can’t find the audio files, but yet they are right there in the data folder.

they are right there in the data folder.

Do they play? The files are little six second snippets of sound and they will play in Audacity.

Koz

Yes, the audio in the data folder plays. That’s why it’s so weird that it won’t play in Audacity. It’s like the files need to be relinked to the data folder, but there is no apparent way to do that.

When audio is processed, Audacity creates new data files containing the processed data. The old data files are retained until the end of the session so that you can “Undo”. The “dangerous” thing about force quit (or any kind of quit) is that the Undo history does not survive - Any data files belonging to the Undo history become “orphans”.

Unfortunately that probably burned the last hope of recovery. “Work around without deleting” (or something like that) is the default and safer option, (though recovery would still have been unlikely even if you had chosen that option).

Do you recall what you were doing when it froze?

When audio is processed, Audacity creates new data files containing the processed data. The old data files are retained until the end of the session so that you can “Undo”. The “dangerous” thing about force quit (or any kind of quit) is that the Undo history does not survive - Any data files belonging to the Undo history become “orphans”.

Unfortunately that probably burned the last hope of recovery. “Work around without deleting” (or something like that) is the default and safer option, (though recovery would still have been unlikely even if you had chosen that option).

Do you recall what you were doing when it froze?

I had just save the project and a window popped up, which I dismissed. I can’t recall what it said because I was in a hurry, but after I dismissed it, a black box appeared and the cursor was spinning in Audacity only. It wouldn’t stop, so I forced quit.

As regards the message about deleting files, it is truly astounding that an application would suggest that files can be deleted without harm, that the files are not needed, when in fact, they are totally needed and result in destroying the whole project!! With the crash and this crazy message, I think I need to find a different DAW, but thank you for your time trying to help solve this.

It didn’t. Audacity said that if found some “orphan” files that are unused by the project that you were opening, and recommended that continue without deleting, but you decided to override the default and deleted them.

Even if you hadn’t deleted them, it would probably made no difference because the files were not referenced by Audacity. Most likely is that they were old “Undo” data that had been created earlier in the project but were no longer used by the project. Normally Audacity will clean up old data files when the project is closed, but on this occasion it did not have the opportunity to do so.

That’s unfortunate as that may have explained what went wrong.

If you decide to continue using Audacity, I would recommend that you run a few test projects with nothing important. This should either restore your faith in Audacity, or give an indication of what the problem is.