recover recording after force quit

[jmnettlesjr]

I recorded about 45 minutes worth of material using the line in on my MBP and have done this several times before. I was in a rush, closed the MBP and went home to edit and save the project later. When I reopened my MBP, Audacity was frozen and had to be force quit. Everytime I force quit and restart Audacity, it asks me if I want to recover the unsaved file. WHen I do, it's nothing but silence. I know it recorded sound because I monitored it while it was recording.

I was able to find the temp folder, copied the contents and moved them to a folder on my desktop - any advice on what to do next or a different route to take to recover this recording would be great.
Thanks!

[billw58]

What was in the temp folder?
-- Bill

[jmnettlesjr]

see the attached screenshots. I copied the folders & subfolders and moved them to a folder on my desktop named "recorded files"
at the end of the rabbit hole were several ".au" files

[steve]

Your first screenshot shows 2 separate projects (two recordings). Did you have two Audacity windows open at the time? If not, one must be an old project.
Hopefully Bill can tell you how to find the autosave file on a Mac, then it should just be a matter of matching up the autosave file with the project data folder that belongs to it.

[jmnettlesjr]

Yes, I recorded a song then stopped the recording when it was over and started a new one in a new window.
The second recording is the one I need over the first, so I assumed it was the second folder which is what I followed through a few subfolders to come up to the .AU files

[billw58]

On Mac, the autosave file is in ~/Library/Application Support/AutoSave/

In there you should find at least one file named "New Project - YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS N-x.autosave" where
YYYY-MM-DD is the date
HH-MM-SS is the time
x can be any number.

If you can find one of those files, please copy and paste the first few lines of the file into a message here, and I'll see what can be done from there.

-- Bill

[jmnettlesjr]

I'm not sure I follow, sorry, but I can't find the autosave folder.
Can you give me the entire address?

[jmnettlesjr]

NVM to my previous comment. Using go to folder I was able to find the autosave folder easily.
Unfortunately the autosave folder is empty

[billw58]

If there is nothing in the AutoSave folder then I don't understand why Audacity is offering to recover a project.

It appears you have lost the AUP file for the original recording. I'm out of my depth here - I don't know of any way, on Mac, of arranging then importing the AU files to reconstruct a recording.

-- Bill

[steve]

If there is nothing in the AutoSave folder then I don't understand why Audacity is offering to recover a project.

It is the presence of the autosave file that tells Audacity that there is a project to recover. If there is no autosave file then Audacity will not attempt to recover anything, but will silently delete any old data files that may exist in the temporary directory.

Perhaps we have a confusion between the autosave directory and the temporary data folder.

On Linux, the temporary data is (by default) written to:
/var/tmp/audacity-<username>
The autosave file is (by default) written to:
/home/<username>/.audacity-data/AutoSave/