Recover audio in .au files from crashed save

[Gremlin]

Hi All

I just recorded two hours audio from speech using a mic, when I saved, the PC (WXP) crashed. I have a directory structure with a set of directories with .au files, but no project file to assemble them. Is there some tool/some way of assembling the 2,000 files (really) back into an audio stream?

[kozikowski]

Two possibilities, none of them particularly good.

Somebody over on the Mac side found a program that you could use to collect them;

<<<Fission by Rogue Amoeba seems to be the only option. It will not grab all the files automatically, but it does allow you to drag and drop the files from the Audacity folder directly to the Fission file and automatically stitches the files into one file.>>>

The other way is to write the .aup file.

Audacity Project files are XML which you can write by hand.

Set up Audacity exactly like you did the first time only this time record three or four seconds or so. Save the project. Open up the .aup file in TextEdit or Notepad and you should see parts of the programming that point to your new .au files. Rewrite it to point to your old files. You may need to record several tests to get the hang of how the code works. If you ever programmed a web page by hand, this stuff will look a lot more familiar.

This is from a musical composition project of mine called, artistically enough, "piano2."

<wavetrack name="piano2" channel="0" linked="1" offset="0.00000000" rate="48000.000000" gain="1.000000"

<simpleblockfile filename='b00002.au' len='302712' min='-0.483513' max='0.599268'


Those are the only two ways I know of to rescue the work.

You do know why the machine crashed, right?

Koz

[Musicalyouth]

Thank you koz. Recently I have been editing all my saved audacity files & changing the ones I want to keep to .mp3 files which are more versatile, and much smaller, thus saving several megabytes.
I had a radio programme I'd recorded in audacity over a year ago. The actual recording was about an hour long, although the programme was only 30 minutes; I'd left the recorder running 30 minutes overtime. For some reason the .aup file opened in audacity, but would not open the data folder with all the .au files in it. There was just an audacity screen showing no sound (but no warning message box). I tried recording a few blank seconds. Saved that with the same name as the original, but it didn't solve the problem. But in the _data folder, the first few 4 files (b00000.au - b00003.au) now had today's date for date modified (but still the original date 15/09/2006 for date created). I then opened another (unwanted) audacity project .aup file in notepad, & in it I changed the <audacityproject projname= [name of the _data folder], saved it, opened it & yes it worked! Mind you I kept getting a warning box saying audacity couldn't open it (sorry I didn't note the exact words), but it did open it. I deleted the final blank 30 minutes, tried playing it but it was too fast, changed the sample rate, now it sounded fine, but it refused to save. Message said something like: "read/write error, cannot write to disk, check if disk is full or write protected". So I copied it & opened a new file & pasted it in, & yes it works & is saved.
One weird thing: although I did the original recording 15/09/2006, one file, b00001.au shows date created 08/08/2006. Maybe I did something odd at the time! Anyway I'm delighted to have retrieved it, thanks.