Audacity Forum

So Audacity crashed after I just completed a 4 hour recording. More than a little annoying.
I opened it up and selected "Yes" to recover. It recovered okay and I went ahead and hit
save. But while it was saving, I realized I was saving to the wrong disk drive and hit "cancel"
which caused Audacity to crash again! This time autoreceovery didn't work and the "recovered"
file has no tracks. Damn it!

Manual recovery is next to impossible thanks to the randomly named temporary files. Why?
Is it designed to make recovery difficult? The file was not edited so if it wasn't for that,
it would have been recoverable.

So Audacity should really crash less and name the .au files sequentially

Why? Is it designed to make recovery difficult?

It's designed to do exactly what it did. Recover the project automatically.

Audacity crashed twice probably with the same problem. After you get your show back together it's probably going to happen again unless you fix the machine problem that caused the first one.

Perfectly true, rejiggering the filenames from the earlier version of Audacity had the perverse effect of making manual recovery much more difficult.

Koz

I realized I was saving to the wrong disk drive

Are you using network disk drives? Audacity doesn't like that very much.

If you have a straight stereo show, you can Export to WAV as an alternative or in addition to Project Save. Also if you're going to create a massive show, You should probably Save individually named Projects as you go. It should be possible to back up to the Project you saved an hour ago and keep working.

If you don't have drivespace for that, then you may have just found why Audacity crashed.

Koz

Audacity Projects do not save UNDO. So the shows have to be self-contained when you do periodic backups.
Koz

kozikowski wrote:

Why? Is it designed to make recovery difficult?

It's designed to do exactly what it did. Recover the project automatically.

Except automatic recovery doesn't always work.

Perfectly true, rejiggering the filenames from the earlier version of Audacity had the perverse effect of making manual recovery much more difficult.

Is there ANY benefit to the highly convoluted file naming?

Are you using network disk drives? Audacity doesn't like that very much.

No network drives. But I am using USB drives.

Also if you're going to create a massive show, You should probably Save individually named Projects as you go. It should be possible to back up to the Project you saved an hour ago and keep working.

Not possible. It is a continuous live recording and I cannot stop to save.

If you don't have drivespace for that, then you may have just found why Audacity crashed.

It may have run out of space. But it also crashed when I canceled a save. That shouldn't happen.

This will never get fixed. All the programming talent will be working on the Unitary File Format.

Save a one file Project instead of the current system of XML text files, _DATA folders full of hierarchical directories, snippets and graphic files, etc., etc.

The goal is a single "photoshop" file which opens up with all your layers, channels, paths, colors etc. intact from when you saved it.

~~

There may be a way to speed up saving.

Someone will correct me, but if you start the night by saving a project, it arms Audacity so it can do future saves very rapidly. It doesn't have to do all the housekeeping and file management. It just has to change a tag here and there.

I don't even remember if this is published anywhere....

I can look.

Koz

But I am using USB drives.

I don't know that anybody is really excited about that. You can do that with FireWire drives. They're high-speed, bi-directional/full duplex. No negotiating. No delays. I used to run machines fully on external FIreWire drives instead of internal drives. Doesn't work with USB. Or it didn't.

I think it may be our official position not to do that. I can look.

Koz

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 27#p234327
I found one.
Looking.
Koz

Here's a piece from the Project documentation.

When saving an Audacity project it is normally easiest to use the File > Save Project command, which has a default shortcut of CTRL + S (or COMMAND + S on Mac). If you save a project again having made further changes to it, "Save Project" then updates the AUP file and _data folder silently without bothering you with prompts.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/au ... jects.html

Koz

smeezekitty wrote:Is there ANY benefit to the highly convoluted file naming?

The current "highly convoluted" system is actually very simple in terms of code (which does the work). Picking an unused random number is both easy and very fast and avoids needing to track which number was used last (and avoids other complexities such as handling "wrap around" when the available numbers are used up, or other possible causes of file name collision which would cause the project to fail).