Audacity Project [almost] completely silent

[bro]

Hi, recently I recorded a relatively large Audacity project, being two-and-a-half minutes long, with 14 different recorded tracks. I loaded it up the other day, and all of the tracks were silent! ...well, all of the tracks but two. I went into the project data folder and most of those are silent as well. Most of the time when I try to play the audio it crashes.

A couple days before it all suddenly became silent I had re-recorded two tracks, but my computer crashed before I was able to save, and I had been logged onto a temporary account, so in order to recover the audio I had to piece the recordings together from the audio in the project data folder. Those two tracks were the only ones that didn't become silent.

The next time I loaded up the file it asked me if I wanted to delete over 400 unused orphan files and I said yes. I'm guessing that was the cause of this issue, but wouldn't that have deleted the files instead of simply making them all silent? The audio also worked perfectly fine when I had loaded it up that time, so I'm not certain that caused the problem.

So, uh, does anybody know what the problem is? Do I have any hope of recovering those recordings?

I have Audacity 2.1.0 and Windows 10.

[kozikowski]

my computer crashed before I was able to save, and I had been logged onto a temporary account

You were doing everything possible to keep Audacity from knowing what you wanted or even who "you" were. Audacity is not unconditionally stable. It's not supported by a massive corporation with offices in multiple large cities. It's a small project that tries to keep its shirt on in three different operating systems and can't catch every possible working variation particularly the odder ones, including system crashes.

So if Audacity tried to run as two different shows and then the system went away, the caches would be chaos with no hope of retrieving the show. You also worked yourself out of the recommended backup plan of exporting WAV files of the show because of your multiple tracks form. WAV only supports at most stereo (two tracks).

That's why nobody posted immediately to help you. I don't think the elves have any idea how to dig you out of trouble which leaves the Forum Format of posters helping each other. We should wait for someone who has a similar system to suggest remedies.

Koz

[bro]

Mm, one thing that I failed to mention was that I've got two operating systems on this computer, and I started this project in Windows 7 before switching to Windows 10. Recently I accidentally booted up Windows 7, but while I was there I decided to try opening this project, and it opened perfectly fine, even though I opened the exact same file. I saved it as a different project and now the problem's solved.

I wanted to still know why this was happening, so I investigated a little. Turns out the audio is all in the project_data folder, but I just don't have permission to use it in the Windows 10 account that I'm using.

[kozikowski]

Thanks for posting back. Win10 has a lot of permission services missing from earlier Windows. You might also discover that your microphone vanished because you don't have permission to use it.

Koz

[steve]

You might also discover that your microphone vanished because you don't have permission to use it.

If that happens, see: viewtopic.php?f=46&t=100117