Unable to play back recordings

[robinderbys]

I have been using Audacity for a while now to record music tracks, save and label them in an Audacity file (about 20 tracks per Audacity file, rather like a CD) and then play them back. I don’t fully understand how everything works but I finish up in the computer’s My Music folder with a named Audacity Project File (Aup) which appears to link to a similarly named data folder which itself consists of many small Real Player files, each containing a short piece of the song(s). I open the Audacity Project File (Aup), click start and the songs play in Audacity
This has worked successfully in the past. However on a recent project I somehow seem to have lost the link between the Aup and data (Real Player) files. On this project if I try to open the Audacity Project File (Aup) file I get the message “couldn’t find the project data folder” although it is in fact there in Real Player with all the associated music files
Can anyone help please

[kozikowski]

<<<Audacity Project File (Aup) which appears to link to a similarly named data folder which itself consists of many small Real Player files, each containing a short piece of the song(s).>>>

That's dangerously close. Audacity Project files are magic and completely complicated. I would not "save" performances in the project format and I'll explain why.

If you open piano.aup (for example) in NotePad or TextEdit, you will find that it's really an XML file with instructions laid out in English computer format. Any programmer can read this stuff with no effort and you can too because you can find things here and there you recognize--like the name of your show.

It's the piano_data folder where it starts to get magic. The first couple of files are graphic files and they tell Audacity how to draw the blue/green waveforms on the screen. The rest of the files aren't always music files and they change dramatically depending on what you're doing. They're not "Real" files, either. That's Real Player greedily assigning to itself anything that looks even remotely like a sound file.

Open a full quality, uncompressed flute.wav file that you recorded live at the last church service. Do a couple of very simple edits to it. Save the project and the flute_data file will contain little or no music. The show is a combination of flute.aup, the flute_data folder, and the original flute.wav file. If you delete flute.wav before you save the show as a new, stand-alone file (flute_final_edit.wav) , then you have no show.

If, on the other hand, your cousin in Schenectady sends you an MP3 file and you open that in Audacity and immediately save the project, then the schenectady_data folder will contain the complete music track plus edits plus waveforms. That's because in order to edit schenectady.mp3, Audacity has to decompress it completely (take it out of MP3 format) and it does that inside the schenectady_data folder.

So depending on what your last show was, if you deleted or moved the original music file, you may very well have deleted your show with it.

Koz

[robinderbys]

Koz
Thanks for the reply, I normally save from Audacity to mp3 but hadn't got round to it in this case, looks like i've lost it, a lesson learned