Help! Lost all audio in AUP after Audacity crashed

[melissalmw]

I was editing a project when Audacity stopped responding. I save often because it crashes all the time. I forced quit and then went to reopen the project. This has happened before and whenever I reopen it offers to open recovered files and that always works fine. This time when I clicked to open the recovered project, it opened my project with no audio on any of the tracks. All waveforms are gone.

I still have the project _data folder. I have no idea what to do to get the waveforms back onto the .aup file.

Any help would be appreciated! I have the original audio recordings (saved from Zoom) but I've already invested like 10 hours into editing and don't want to have to start over.

[kozikowski]

I save often because it crashes all the time.

I'd stop editing the show and fix the computer. There is no "crashing all the time." Your computer and Audacity are not a good match.

How long is the show? How much room on your computer or drives?

Do you use cloud storage? Audacity hates cloud storage, iCloud, One-Drive, etc. Suppliers want you to think they're just like regular internal drives and they appear like that in your system, but they're not. You can't do real-time audio production with a cloud drive or any storage whose real-world location could be several time zones away.

You should close the cloud drive connection and do all your production and editing on the local drives in the Mac. After you're finished, then you can store edit master files or other off-line production work on the cloud, and then only as backup, not the one and only copy of valuable work.

Koz

[melissalmw]

I do use OneDrive for work, so will switch to using my local hard drive until the editing is complete for the future.

The show isn't terribly long, only an hour between 3 different user tracks. Is there any way I can recover the project I was working on?

[kozikowski]

I save often because it crashes all the time.

The ideal if your current show fails, is to open the last protection backup and proceed from there.

The file names would be:

Thursday Before Lunch
Thursday After Lunch
Friday After Breakfast, etc.

Not "My One Valuable Show" with a million data saves to it. If Valuable Show fails, that's the end of the world.

I still have the project _data folder.

Open up the _data folder and find all the little au files. Each one is a six-second sound file and will open in Audacity. If they're missing or all of them are silent, that's the end of the show.

Do you have Mac Time Machine set up to automatically copy your system to a backup drive?

Screen Shot 2021-01-22 at 7.34.48 AM.png (100.6 KiB) Viewed 148 times

If so, you may be able to Time Machine your way back to an earlier time or date and get the show back that way.

Koz

[steve]

The file names would be:

Thursday Before Lunch
Thursday After Lunch
Friday After Breakfast, etc.

I use numbers:

MyBigProject001
MyBigProject002
MyBigProject003
...

The leading zeros keep the names in chronological order beyond "MyBigProject009" when sorted alpha-numerically by my file browser.

[jademan]

The show isn't terribly long, only an hour between 3 different user tracks. Is there any way I can recover the project I was working on?

So I have never rebuilt one, and I don't see anyone else volunteering. I suppose you could zip up the whole project and post a link to it somewhere. Someone might look at it, but probably not. It is quite possible, probable in fact based on your description, that all of your data somehow got zero'd out, and there is nothing left.

You can look into the project data file directory, "Ivy Tech Episode_data", and look for .au files. There will be about a thousand of them, each about 6 seconds long. I think you can drag them directly into an empty Audacity project. But I suspect they are all or mostly zeros. If not, you may be able to piece your project back together. I believe that the order they are named in the .aup project file is the same order they need to be re-assembled in, but I am not sure. There is also, some clue, that the fourth and fifth letter of the file name, or some such, are related to the name of the sub-sub-directory where it is found.

but I've already invested like 10 hours into editing and don't want to have to start over.

Well, this project should be a snap for you, then. With a thousand files, let's see now, if you do one hundred files per hour, it should only take about... oh - about ten hours. And there is no guarantee of success.

God speed and good luck.