HELLLLPPP!!!!! MY FILES!!!

[eternalvibrations]

Hello Audacity Forum, I have made about hmm 75-100 short music clips I would say around 1 minute each because I am a new user of this program. I had the files in a few different places and kinda mixed up on my computer so I tried to merge them to one folder. Now I cannot access these although i still have all 2420 or so files saved on my computer, but mixing these around caused them to be un- playable. I am pretty concerned about this considering they are song ideas that I have been working on for the past year or so. Is there a quick fix to this ?? did I majorly screw up ? these are questions I would love to know hahah !! any help would be much appreciated thanks

Shane ( Pennsylvania)

[billw58]

Start by having a look at this: http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... y_Projects

Those 2400 files belong to the 75 to 100 audacity projects.

There is no quick fix for this.

If all those 2400 files have unique file names and you still have the .aup project files, you might be able to manually recover the projects, but it would be tedious and time consuming.

-- Bill

[eternalvibrations]

Thanks for the response Bill,

the interesting thing is, when i look at the files in my windows search result pulling up Audacity, what i see is the data folders first (empty) Then the AU. files that go into that folder are all in date order/ after each Aup. file. And on down the list of about 2400 of this mix.

[kozikowski]

The Neat and Orderly people always get burned with this. Audacity does not Save sound files. It saves Projects which, as you're finding out, are collections of files which together make up your show.

As a general rule, you can't move anything once you create a Project. Locations and names of folders are burned into the Project and if you move any of the files, the Project Manager can't find them any more.

Are you on a Windows where you can Step Back to an earlier machine and environment? If you are, run each Project and Export As WAV. That will give you a stand-alone, self-contained sound file of each show that you can move wherever you want.

If you can separate the pile of files according to date, then it's remotely possible you can recreate the Projects.

Each Project consists of an AUP file -- the Project Manager, a _data folder, and a bunch of AU files inside.

Your job is to match everything up.

FluteSolo.aup
FluteSolo_data folder

I can't tell you what the au files look like because Audacity 1.3 is very different from 1.2, but yes, they will all have the same date/time stamp. I guess File > Properties???

The AUP file is text and you can open it up in NotePad and read it. The first few lines of instruction should tell you what the original Project name was. We have people posting after they changed all the names around and nothing wants to open any more.

There is one very deadly thing you can do. Did you put dates inside your file names? You can't put slash marks inside a file name. That's forbidden in most computer systems. That can really dig you a hole. 20100917. That's today's date. Not 9/17/10.

Koz

[eternalvibrations]

Koz, do you mean roll back on system restore or just a different format of windows? like the aero environment vs classic. I dont believe I have the date problem you mentioned. When I search through the files they are ordered by date, seems like putting them together for some reason is giving me difficulties.

Anybody else have any ideas I could try ?

Shane PA

[billw58]

OK, so you want to put these files back together.

You've found the _data folders - that's good. Have you found the ".aup" files? That's critical - without the .aup files you'll never put them back together.

For each _data folder (for example "song01_data") the should be a .aup file (for example "song01.aup).

If you have the .aup files then we'll move on to the next step.

-- Bill

[eternalvibrations]

Well,

I have AUP files and also AU files. The data folders are separately lined up also. Maybe if I show somebody who would have a kean eye to this some screen shots you could send me on my way to fixing what I did here ! lol

Shane ( PA)