Recorded track but won't play back or save file

[deceasedlavy]

Unfortunately, I have been unable to save the project at all. Here is a brief recap of exactly what I did:
I recorded a brief "test" track, then forgot to stop recording for several minutes. I then stopped, and cut out the several minutes of silence at the end of the track. It was about two hours later (about 13 hours AGO) when I began recording again, same project, new track. Once my conversation was over, I believe I hit pause, and then stop. I'm not positive that I hit pause (no idea if that makes any difference). Then I tried to save the project, play the project...and here we are. I've created a label track and named each individual track. I can move them backward and forward in time with the "double arrow" tool, toggle between mono and stereo, sample formats, etc.

I have kept the computer on this whole time hoping this can be salvaged.
I do have a second computer available...not sure how that would help.
No, no backup of the recording.
Do you have any idea WHY this happened? I don't recall ever experiencing this before. I am open to any outlandish suggestion, as I need to be able to transcribe this conversation for an article I'm writing, which is due Monday.

[deceasedlavy]

One more thing: I've discovered that I can open saved .aup projects, and while most menu options are available on these, the "play" and "record" buttons still won't work.

[kozikowski]

I got a pretty good idea. When you delete something, Audacity doesn't really delete. It marks the work as unplayable and from that point forward, just goes around it. This allows for UNDO. So you think you're trying to save a three minute conversation, when in fact you're trying to save every capture and every keystroke since you turned the computer on. Probably many gigs of sound information. Do you have that much room on your hard drive?

I don't, either.

Try this. You have all your valuable work still alive on the timeline, right? Is it edited down to the show you actually want?

Export As WAV. Forget the project.

You'll be doing that anyway because Audacity will not save a sound file.

You created one other problem. You pressed the "wrong" keys during the capture (Pause-Stop) and Audacity may now be in an unstable state. So that may be the end of the show except to try and reconstruct it from capture snippets -- and remember, you'll be doing it from gigs and thousands of capture snippets, not the three minutes of the actual conversation.

This is how I do live capture (in answer to somebody else's slightly different question).

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... ion#p53280

You might read the second posting in that series, too. "Audacity Projects are for advanced editors in very large shows.

Koz

[deceasedlavy]

Um...
The "export as .WAV" option is grey, just like almost everything else in the "File" menu (see above). Everything is still alive on the timeline; I just can't seem to DO anything constructive with it.

I do have at least 40 gigs available on my hard drive.

I believe I understand some of what you're saying, but not everything. I'll look into the thread you suggested when I have a chance, but unfortunately I have to go to a wedding now. This is the worst possible weekend for this to have happened! I really appreciate all the suggestions; this has got to be the most actively helpful tech forum I've ever found on the net. I will return to this issue at some point over the next couple of days, and update you on my status. I'm hopeful that I can actually "reconstruct it from capture snippets", as you say, if nothing else--but you are aware that none of it has been saved at all, right? I certainly welcome any other possibilities, and I'll return ASAP. Cheers!

[kozikowski]

Does the valuable work play? Can you borrow a Mac? Jack your Headphone Out to his/hers Line-In and re-record the work on the Mac. Quicktime Pro will do this ($25) or download the Mac Audacity.

Sorry, this doesn't work with another laptop PC. It might work with a large Deskside PC. They have Line-In (usually blue).

That's the Desperation Method.

Yes, this forum does tend toward the "I can help the poster before you can!!"

It helps that I'm in a significantly different time zone from a lot of the other elves.

Koz

[deceasedlavy]

No, it doesn't even play...if you check out my first post on page 1 of the thread, you'll see the full rundown of what's available for me to do...really appreciate the help, I gotta head out of town but I'll check back in ASAP!

[steve]

There should some folders in the Audacity temporary folder that have a whole load of small files in them.
I think that the default location of the temporary folder is C:windowstempaudacity_1_2_temp
If you are able to open up Audacity Preferences you can check the location by looking in the "directories" tab.

Go to the Audacity temporary folder and copy the contents to some type of removable media - be careful not to disturb anything. Copy the entire contents of the folder - because of the duff recording that you made in the same session the total contents may be extremely large so you may need to get creative in how you copy these. Will they fit on a CD? a DVD? a large USB flash drive? an external hard drive?

On your second computer open up Audacity and import the newest of the .AU files into Audacity (the last .AU file in date order). This should be the last few seconds of the recording. Most of the AU files will be 1MB in size and hold about 6 seconds of the recording. Repeat the process and cut/paste each AU file to the begining track.

If the recording that you are trying to recover is quite long, you could try one of the other methods described here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... shRecovery

I strongly recommend that you do this on a second computer as anything you do in Audacity will create new .AU files in the temporary folder and confuse the issue.

Good luck.

[deceasedlavy]

Thank you sooo much, I am going to attempt this tomorrow.

[jamestown0509]

Hi, I have quite a similar problem. I record meetings for the fire police and fire department using an external mike. When I save a file that is completed I am saving it by a specific project name. Usually there are two separate files created on my desktop. One shows Audacity with the icon and that file plays the audio. The second is a vertical list of the specific audio files in channel sequence. I have noted several times that a project I have saved when reopened to play will say "no file found" where I know it was saved previously and should be there. Any suggestions?
Greg

[billw58]

There should not be a "vertical list of files". If you save (for example) "My Project" there should be a file called "My Project.aup" (this is the one with the icon) and a folder called "My Project_data". The "vertical list of files" should be in that folder. You must always keep the AUP file and the _data folder together. If you move one without moving the other with it you will lose your audio and get the dreaded "file not found" error. If you move the AUP file into the _data folder you will also get the error. The AUP file and the _data folder must live in the same folder, side by side so to speak.

-- Bill