Recovering crashes manually

If you have the AUP project file, open it to return the last saved state of the project. If the last saved state was a new, empty project, or if you don't have an AUP project file, you can recover the audio from the project's _data folder or Audacity's temporary folder by one of the manual or automatic methods below.

The _data folder will be in the same directory as the AUP file.

Location of Temporary Folder
This is only relevant if you never saved a project and have no usable AUP file or AUTOSAVE file.

Manual recovery
If you only have a few AU files to recover, use the "Import Audio" command to open all the .au files from the Audacity temporary folder or project _data folder. Use shift-click or control-click to select multiple files. The files will be in approximately 6-second chunks and will be on separate tracks in the Audacity screen. Files from stereo tracks will alternate between left and right channels.


 * 1) Click in the Track Control Panel (by the Mute/Solo buttons) of the topmost track.
 * 2) Z or.
 * 3) Click in the Track Control Panel of the first track you want to join to the topmost track.
 * 4) Z or.
 * 5) Click.
 * 6) Click after the end of the topmost track.
 * 7) Press on the keyboard.
 * 8) Click and the cut track will attach to the end of the topmost track.
 * 9) Repeat as necessary to join all the tracks onto the topmost track.
 * 1) Repeat as necessary to join all the tracks onto the topmost track.

Play the result.

Cut and paste as needed if any files are found to be in the wrong order or the wrong channel.

Automatic recovery tools
Tools written for legacy Audacity 1.2 can automate data recovery.

Open Audacity's temporary or project _data folder in your system file manager. Sort the files by timestamp order (earliest first), then rename them using a consecutive alphanumerical sequence, lowest number first. An arrangement looking something like this should work:


 * b001.au 15:56:02
 * b002.au 15:56:02
 * b003.au 15:56:10
 * b004.au 15:56:10

Limitations of automatic recovery utilities

 * There is a 2 GB maximum size for any WAV file created from the reconstructed temporary files. This implies no more than 2000 .au files can be recovered. Sometimes (probably due to bugs in the utilities) there can be errors when recovering only 1000 or so files. In that case you would need to split the .au files in the temporary or_data folder into two or more folders, each containing consecutively numbered files, and recover a separate WAV file from each folder.
 * Recovery of unedited mono recordings should be correct in most cases.
 * Recovery of unedited stereo recordings may recover with transposed left/right channels in places. This is because the files for each channel may have time stamps that are too close together to be correctly distinguished by the operating system.
 * If any of the project data has been edited, it is unlikely to recover correctly.

1.2 Audacity Recovery Utility
The 1.2 Audacity Recovery Utility assumes the project rate was 44100 Hz. If your project was at other than 44100 Hz, the recovered WAV file will be the wrong length and play at the wrong speed. To correct this after importing the recovery WAV file, click in the name of the track (by the downward-pointing arrow) then use "Set Rate" to choose the correct rate.

Windows and Linux

Follow the instructions on the Audacity Recovery Utility page. On Linux, you may need to install additional libraries before you can use the utility, following the instructions provided.

Mac

Download the following utilities instead which are ready-compiled with the necessary libraries:


 * for Power PCs
 * for Intel Macs

Then follow the instructions on the Audacity Recovery Utility page from "About the Audacity Recovery Utility" onwards.

File merge tools

 * It has been reported that AU files may be converted to WAV (for example in Audacity) then joined using the disk output utility in Winamp.

audacity_rescue.sh
This shell script can reassemble a few thousand .au files. It may be simpler to apply (at a bash terminal) than some of the solutions mentioned on this page, particularly for mono recordings.

SoX
 Using SoX, make a copy of the temp directory and its files from a mono recording: $ cp -r /tmp/audacity1.2-jbn ~/rescue Convert the AU files into raw (headerless) files. The files must already be time-sorted and numbered with leading zeroes: $ for f in b*.au ; do sox ${f} -t raw ${f}.raw ; done Concatenate the raw files together to make one long raw file. Concatenating the AU files together (each with its own header) would produce noise at the joins between each AU file. $ cat *.raw > bigfile.raw Finally, import the raw file into Audacity specifying the appropriate encoding, endianness, channels and sample rate. 