Need to recover project, all files orphaned?

[cbp67]

The up side is you can publish your rescue process if it works better than ours. You'll be a hero.
Koz

It wasn't much of a process. I just wrote a python script to rename the files sequentially based on timestamp. If you think that's valuable, I can clean it up and publish it. Then I used the audacity_recovery app to recover the audio from the renamed files, which only mostly worked (I got that OverflowError).

I'm really not trying to throw shade on Audacity here - I really do appreciate the app. Just wish that it would package the project files into a single unit, and I wish it was a little more robust against project corruption (and easier to repair).

BTW... where is auto save enabled? I can't find it in the preferences anywhere. That might have saved my butt.

[kozikowski]

I'm pretty sure there is no Auto Save. The very last thing you need on a borderline powered machine is for it to start managing a save cycle in the middle of a recording—or worse, an overdubbing session.

Koz

[steve]

I'm pretty sure there is no Auto Save

There is, but it's a machine readable file, not a human readable file.

The very last thing you need on a borderline powered machine is for it to start managing a save cycle in the middle of a recording—or worse, an overdubbing session.

I'd guess that's why it is dumped to disk as binary data rather than encoding and formatting it into a human readable form.

[waxcylinder]

The files are randomly named??

In older Audacity versions, they were. I remember when they did that random thing they were solving a very real production problem whose description escapes me. It's been plaguing performers ever since.

Sorry, just frustrated...

I can make it worse. The developer daddies don't think this is a big problem and I don't think it's even on the Problems To Be Solved list.

That is being more than a little harsh on the developers who, as you well know Koz, are very few in number on this volunteer Open Source Project.

Yes it has been on the radar for a fair while now, has been much discussed by Team members (including yourself at times) - it has a formal Proposal in the Audacity Wiki, which was started by Steve back in 2011:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Propo ... ry_Project

It's also more recently come on to James Crook's (key developer) "Problems To Be Solved list" in his umbrella Proposal for "Low Hanging Fruit":
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Propo ... ging_Fruit

The problem is that as he states there: "Not quite low hanging fruit, but very good value for the work that would be expended." and "This one is potentially a lot of work, but the benefit in reduced support of keeping all audio in one file is HUGE." - i.e. it will be a fair bit of work to code (and test) and we are but few in number - so the trade-off is do we get new additional features or do we expend effort on this? And given that we are a volunteer project we don't have a management structure to choose and direct ...

Audacity 2.2.0 will shortly be out. I asked if this was the version with the single file Project format (hopefully).

Ummmmmmm.

No.

And the reason it won't be is because we have very few developers - and none of them has, so far, volunteered to work on this. Rather for the upcoming 2.2.0:

a) James gives us choosable themes, revised menu structures and other new stuff

b) Paul Licameli has worked hard on making Audacity more secure and safe to use (especially in out of space situations) and has helped top work on the new MIDI playback with PokeChu22 (a long-standing feature request)

c) Steve has been working hard to add help links to the Manual for all the Effects, Generators & Analyzers - and from some of the key (and tricky) error messages

And those really are all we have right now, sadly.

Peter

[kozikowski]

has been much discussed by Team members (including yourself at times)

I didn't discuss it. I just complained about it. I'm not a developer. I'm modeling the Lowly User.

All those tasks are difficult and the goals are important, but to back out to 10,000 feet for a second, the goal of Audacity is to make a product or show. Involving split-file Projects seems to not be the best, most stable way to do that.

How would you advise the poster at the top of this thread? As near as we can tell, they did nothing wrong and yet, we just spent the last three days sweeping his show up from the floor, and they're still going to have to re-record some of the non-recoverable segments.

It's completely by accident I didn't get swept up in this. I knew from the first day I wanted WAV files and took steps to get them. I've never had a show crash because I've never used Projects.

Koz

[steve]

Involving split-file Projects seems to not be the best, most stable way to do that.

It may not seem like the best, most stable way when looking from the ruins of a broken project, but it's virtually universal for DAW type applications. Pick any of the big names: Cubase, Sonar, Logic, Reaper, Audition, even the lowly Garage Band, they all save multi-file projects.

As might be expected from Apple's usability geniuses, Garage Band hides the fact that the project has multiple parts, so that it looks like one file, until you move it to a new computer when it shatters into a million fragments.

The real reason that Audacity does not yet have a unitary project format, is that it very difficult for a DAW type application to use a single file project format in an efficient and reliable manner. When Audacity gets a single file project format, I think that will be a unique feature.

Several DAW type application provide some means of 'zipping' the project into a single file bundle, but the user has to know that they need to do that on top of saving the project. It also does not help in the event of a crash, because these applications work with multi-part projects, and the single file version of the project is just a packed version of the multi-part project that has to be unpacked before it can be used.

[steve]

I've never used Projects

Yes you have. Audacity always works with Projects, never directly on files.

You may not have ever "saved" Audacity Projects, but you always use them. The fact that you have never had a show crash, indicates how reliable the Project format is in normal circumstances. Each time we read a post about a broken project, we are looking at an exceptional circumstance, usually brought about by machine failure, user error, or interference from a third party application.

I don't recall the last time that I lost data from a project - it was way back in the 1.3.x beta versions.

[cbp67]

Interesting info on projects - thanks for posting.

Would it be possible to have an option to zip a project built in? Because I move my projects around constantly, it would be handy to have that. I know I can do this manually, but it would be nice if the tool had this built in and understood how to open the zip when I double-click it. (I'm not looking for compression here, just consolidation.)

Another option might be to keep the project file within the folder, so it's still logically one "unit". So... saving new project called "my_project" creates a folder like this:

my_project:
- my_project.aup
- e00
-- d00
-- d01
-- d02

This would help with clutter, too. I find myself doing 2-3 related projects at once on my desktop, with similar names, and it gets crowded and confusing real fast. And also maybe you could maintain a project file backup, or some sort of change history, that might help with recovery.

It would also be nice to have a tool that will reconstruct a valid (if minimal) .aup file from a data folder. I realize you would lose a lot of info for a highly-edited project, but for a simple set of raw tracks, it seems like that would be pretty straightforward. This would help not only for corrupt project files, but missing project files (someone forgot to copy them together, or accidentally deleted the project file but not the data folder, etc).

Just some thoughts. Thanks for all the detailed replies!

[steve]

Another option might be to keep the project file within the folder,

That's more or less how I work:

my_project
- myproject.aup
- myprodect_data
- - e00
- - - d00
- - - d01
- - - d02
my_project_resources
- my_project_notes.txt
- my_project_lyrics.pdf
- my_project_imported files
- - file1.wav
- - file2.wav

[cbp67]

Another option might be to keep the project file within the folder,

That's more or less how I work:

my_project
- myproject.aup
- myprodect_data
- - e00
- - - d00
- - - d01
- - - d02
my_project_resources
- my_project_notes.txt
- my_project_lyrics.pdf
- my_project_imported files
- - file1.wav
- - file2.wav

Yeah, good call. I'll start doing that, too.