Audacity Success Story (Hooray for XML in .AUP files!)

[ferdnyc]

I posted the following tale on Facebook earlier (http://www.facebook.com/FeRDNYC/posts/10201244930148639), but I thought I'd share it here.

Score one for transparent, open data structures and unobfuscated file formats.

I was able to recover (or, quickly reconstruct) hours' worth of work on an Audacity sound-editing project recently, after its audio data blocks were completely savaged by a hard drive crash. This wouldn't have been possible using any software that writes project data in a proprietary, binary format. Fortunately, Audacity's project files are standard XML, which ended up saving the day.

Because I still had the DVD with the original project input .WAVs, and the Audacity project file itself was still intact, I was able to open the original project (in replace-missing-blocks-with-silence mode) and use it as a guide for re-importing the source files onto the timeline. Then, I deleted the corrupted tracks and saved the re-"initialized" state in a new project file.

After closing Audacity, I reapplied all of my edit points, (complex) envelopes, and other parameterization to the re-imported tracks the "old-fashioned way": by opening the project files in my text editor, and cutting-and-pasting the relevant XML from the original .AUP into the new project file!

[kozikowski]

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Koz

[ferdnyc]

Meh. Well, that's Facebook for you, sorry! The post is Public, but I suppose there are varying degrees of "public". (Any logged-in Facebook user should be able to see it.)

...It was just me telling the same story I posted here (actually, a shorter & less detailed version), so you aren't missing anything.