I edited a project for three hours and saved it to the Desktop. I even emailed that file to a friend, but now as I checked, that file was only 25 kB and seems to not contain anything… This is very confusing.
This morning I wanted to export the project to MP3, but it said cannot find libmp3lame.dylib, and then Audacity froze. I force quit Audacity, and when I re-opened it it mentioned something about recovering the file, but then the file did not get recovered but this window popped up:
After I selected the first one (continue without deleting), I got a file without any of my previous audios… It’s all flat curves. May I know what’s going on?? Instead I have got tons of orphan files in another folder on the desktop…
The Audacity log is attached here:
log.txt (141 KB)
Can someone please help me here? Did I lose my project? Thanks very much.
You may have sent someone your Project Manager (AUP) File. That’s a text file that tells Audacity what to do with all that stuff in the _DATA folder. They both have to be there. This is one Project.
The _DATA folder holds your show in tiny 6-second sound snippets and it arranges them and shuffles them around depending on your edit.
If you wanted a perfect quality, stand-alone sound file, you can File > Export WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit.
If you want an MP3 (not recommended for editing and production), you have to add software to Audacity. Anybody can play MP3s, but making one is licensed, and that’s a problem when Audacity is free.
I don’t know why your show crashed. Someone else may post.
It’s a common error to edit and save corrections to the one and only copy of the song or show. If Audacity does anything wrong, it’s possible to completely destroy the show.
This happened to me a while ago. I believe I know the issue to your problem. You might have to try launching audacity from your terminal instead of using the desktop link. I have to do this every time I open audacity or else I’ll continuously be left with flat lines whenever I record or save my audio. It’s pretty annoying, but it gets the job done. What you have to do is copy and past the following code into your terminal:
/Applications/Audacity.app/Contents/MacOS/Audacity
Once you’ve pasted that in there, just click enter and it should open audacity. Then from there in audacity, click File. Then click on open, then click the track that you want to open. This should fix your flatline problem.
