Audacity - lost recorded files!

R

rob aylestone

Moderator
I'm not an audacity user, but Audition refused to talk to my X32 mixer, so I started audacity - and tried that. It could see the 16 tracks from the mixer, so I pushed record on my macbook pro, and the screen started to fill with the audio. Happy it was recording, I created a new recording and pushed record just before the first half of the show. At the interval I pushed stop and saved the file - the round spinning wheel was there for a while and then turned back to the cursor. I then recorded the second half in the same way. At the end, again the display was showing the music, and again the save took a while.

The problem I have is that it obviously didn't save properly, and all the files when loaded back in are empty!

I've looked in the data folder, and there are 5000 files each about 6 seconds long, and all seem to be the test I did at the start. The show .au files seem missing? So i have 5.7Gb of files, mostly empty and that's not enough for 16 tracks of around 110 minutes of music?

Any idea what I did - I seem to have lost the entire show!
 
Yep. Audacity does that sort of thing sometimes. I've lost entire songs that we'd worked for months on.

There's an option in there that allows you to edit your files in place (i.e. lossy editing). It may be toggled on by default; you probably want it off.

Though with 5.7 GB of files, that does sound like it should have all your stuff.
 
I moved the entire thing to a different computer and it report an error but said they were recoverable, but looking at the log it reported that it had fixed the corrupt files by replacing them with silence which explains why 99% are empty. So looks like a write off, which is rather annoying. They say first impressions count. Record light on, waveforms appearing, the assumption this means it's recording? I've solved the audition problem. Mismatched sample rates - I didn't realise somebody had changed the desk default, and audacity seemed the quick solution. Oh well.
 
Hindsight being a wonderful thing!
I wonder why you did not just use Reaper in the first place?

Dave.
 
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