I just did a bunch of recording in audacity, and the computer randomly restarted in the middle of it

When I restarted audacity it asked me if I wanted to restore the files (at least, that's what I thought it asked me but now suspect I may have misread it ) - I clicked yes and it spent a minute doing something before it loaded up... but still nothing restored...

Is there any likelihood I could get the file back manually??

Hi!

I showed your post to my brother, and he said first of all:
Don't bother with audacity - he recommends 'Goldwav'
But then he said: "Hmmm, actually, it may not have been audacity's fault."
And he finished with (to me): "Leave that for now, and I'll look in to it."!!

Not the most helpful advice, but I thought I'd let you know anyway as no one else has replied!! Hope you get your files back, and maybe my brother can put a posting up later, if he can make up his mind first!

Hehe, thanks.

I use audacity because it's free and easy to use

I don't think it was audacity's fault - we have lightning at the moment and I suspect it tripped the electric for a second.

Thanks for asking your bro. It's worth a try

Audacity is actually quite good for audio editing. Someone on this site initially recommended it but I discovered that it's recommended by the dedicated home computer recordist/musician magazines; and that it is perfectly capable of getting recordings into production.

It came with the qualification of being fine for the serious home user but hasn't all the refinements needed in a volume production outfit. (I've discovered a couple of reasons why, like the ease with which you can delete tracks; and I can't find out how to do a global select.) One of its failings is no auto-save/checkpoint as you discovered. Another is its annoying habit of mixing down muted tracks during export of a wav. Could be my fault but it's a right annoyance if you want to keep alternate takes and still export sounding tracks as a wav.

It has strengths though. It's easy to edit then strring together many separate "takes". One would love a bigger screen but that isn't the fault of audacity and no recording software or hardware seems to have a way to show everything.

If you saved your work as a project, your file should be where you saved it and be useable from your last save - I've just tried it - made a few alterations to a project then turned it off from task manager and I can recall the previous version of the interrupted file.

If you haven't saved it...uh-oh. Music software seems to make heavy demands on the PC so you must save every time you create an event. A worthwhile precaution at least.

Needless to say I gave it a try (as you said, it's free). It can do all I need so far - sample and recording editing, drawing fade-ins/outs, splicing bits together and that.

WS

I've heard that parts of the UK are having lightning right now! Do you like it?! Sorry to go off-topic.... You're probably right though - that must have been the reason for your PC doing a restart!

Unfortunately the pc restarted in the middle of me recording (I was doing a major recording session trying to lay down a decent version of Syrinx)

Steinway: I love lightning!

A forum member has been kind enough to PM me with a way I might be able to get at the temp file of the recording - though I am too tired to work it out tonight. But it's a start and we can but hope