Audacity Success Story (Hooray for XML in .AUP files!)
Posted: Sun May 19, 2013 7:11 pm
I posted the following tale on Facebook earlier (http://www.facebook.com/FeRDNYC/posts/10201244930148639), but I thought I'd share it here.
Score one for transparent, open data structures and unobfuscated file formats.
I was able to recover (or, quickly reconstruct) hours' worth of work on an Audacity sound-editing project recently, after its audio data blocks were completely savaged by a hard drive crash. This wouldn't have been possible using any software that writes project data in a proprietary, binary format. Fortunately, Audacity's project files are standard XML, which ended up saving the day.
Because I still had the DVD with the original project input .WAVs, and the Audacity project file itself was still intact, I was able to open the original project (in replace-missing-blocks-with-silence mode) and use it as a guide for re-importing the source files onto the timeline. Then, I deleted the corrupted tracks and saved the re-"initialized" state in a new project file.
After closing Audacity, I reapplied all of my edit points, (complex) envelopes, and other parameterization to the re-imported tracks the "old-fashioned way": by opening the project files in my text editor, and cutting-and-pasting the relevant XML from the original .AUP into the new project file!
Score one for transparent, open data structures and unobfuscated file formats.
I was able to recover (or, quickly reconstruct) hours' worth of work on an Audacity sound-editing project recently, after its audio data blocks were completely savaged by a hard drive crash. This wouldn't have been possible using any software that writes project data in a proprietary, binary format. Fortunately, Audacity's project files are standard XML, which ended up saving the day.
Because I still had the DVD with the original project input .WAVs, and the Audacity project file itself was still intact, I was able to open the original project (in replace-missing-blocks-with-silence mode) and use it as a guide for re-importing the source files onto the timeline. Then, I deleted the corrupted tracks and saved the re-"initialized" state in a new project file.
After closing Audacity, I reapplied all of my edit points, (complex) envelopes, and other parameterization to the re-imported tracks the "old-fashioned way": by opening the project files in my text editor, and cutting-and-pasting the relevant XML from the original .AUP into the new project file!