Audacity Forum

So listen, I am very new to audacity and have a very simple understanding of computer knowledge. I have begun creating a podcast using audacity and had spent 30 hours on an episode, over the holiday i spent a few weeks off the editing work and when i went back and tried to open my project again (that I have meticulously saved) kept saying it could not open or locate the file. After my initial freakout I called my brother and the two of us looked at all these questions ya'll have posted about similar issues and attempted to resolve them. We did the whole renaming the "projname" thing but then it began to say "invalid token at line 3"- then when researching hat to do about this it was talking about the presence of non-English characters (I'm assuming punctuation), and despite us trying every single name combination possible for the coding nothing was working.

A new day: I go to Long & Mcquade to get help from the audio guy who has helped me a lot in past- he sees the problem and does not understand where it is coming from. after some serious digging we see that all of my project file (total 1 hr) was DECOMPRESSED INTO THOUSANDS OF 6 SECONDS CLIPS IN SEPARATE FOLDERS. My audio buddy did a few things and then realized we could compress all of these small clips together- A shining light of hope!! But after we waited the 30 minutes for it to compress and paste it onto audacity, It had compressed into a 3 & 1/2 hour audio set of WHITE NOISE and i almost threw up. Now not only do i still have all these little decompressed files, but i have the huge white noise file and now my original episode project cannot be found (I have it but it says its only a few KB.

I have no idea what is happening or if my project is revivable. Whatever happened within Audacity or within my computer has thrown me into a depressed rampage and i am in desperate need of help. If anybody knows what is wrong, how to fix it, or anything- even just telling me wtf i did wrong to lead me here. I've come to accept the fate that the whole thing might be lost.

It's supposed to be a lot of 6 second clips - that's how Audacity works - see: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/aud ... jects.html

WC

AUDACITY PROJECTS

Audacity doesn't save sound files. It saves Projects. This is a Project.



https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/aud ... jects.html

The AUP is a text file that tells Audacity what to do with all the stuff in the _DATA folder. You're not supposed to mess around inside the _DATA folder. For one thing, they're not all sound files. Only the AUP file knows how to put the show back together. The AUP file and the _DATA folder need to be close to each other—in the same folder. They won't go looking for each other across different folders, directories, drives or machines.

You should be able to double-click the AUP file and Audacity will open and present your show.

If that doesn't work, then yes, there's something wrong and your show may be in trouble.

If you do live announcing or recording for your show, it's strongly recommended that you File > Export WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit sound files (not MP3) of the raw performances . That's so if something goes wrong with the Project, you don't have to announce it all over again.

If you do spend a million years editing one show, File > Save-As and save it to more than one Project name as you go. ThursdayNoon.aup, ThursdayAfterNoon.aup. FridayNoon.aup, etc. That way, if something goes wrong, you can fall back to the last known good Project. Don't just keep piling corrections and edits onto one Project.

If you use dates in a file name, use the ISO form. Today is 2019-01-06. Don't put slash marks anywhere in a file name. If you use times, write them in 24-hour to avoid punctuation marks. 1430 is 2:30PM. Some computers can't handle the ":" mark.

Don't put any punctuation marks in filenames other than _underscore_ and -dash-.

Koz