Recover Audacity project from .au data files

8 Replies

In this post I tell you how to recover an Audacity project from the data files when all feels lost.

Quick introduction. Audacity is a free, open source audio recording program. It  works well and has useful features. The way it works, similar to other software, is while recording it saves a file every 6 seconds to keep from generating a giant audio file in memory. These are .au files.

Then, the program saves a .aup file which is essentially a playlist for the software to know which order to replay those files. There is a little more but that’s the basic idea.

If, for some reason, the .aup file fails to save you will feel despondent and helpless. Especially if you recorded an hour and a half interview that now appears to be completely lost. A search online for help in solving your problem will not leave you feeling better, unless you came here first.

For some reason, Audacity does not save the .au files with sequential filenames, they are random. This is a problem if you need to put them back in order. Note to developers, please change this.

For this solution I am using Audacity 2.1.xx. Navigate to the folder location for the project. Inside you should find a series of numbered folders each with approximately 256 .au files. Starting with the first sub-folder, follow these steps.

    1. Sort the folder by date created
    2. Rename so that files are sequentially named, either with bulk rename and brute force or with PowerShell or similar bulk renaming tool.
    3. In Audacity File–>Import–>Audio–> Select all the files (Do this in batches, limit to under 1000, preferable the 256 that Audacity separates folders into)
    4. Wait while it churns
    5. Ctrl+A to select all the tracks
    6. Tracks–>Align Tracks–>Align End to End
    7. Ctrl+A to select all the tracks
    8. Tracks–>Mix–>Mix and render
    9. Wait while it churns
    10. Export WAV or MP3 (name this after it’s folder so you know what order they go in)
    11. Repeat for each sub-folder

Combine these into a new file with the same Align/Mix actions as before and export as your filetype of choice.

I hope that this has helped even just one person. Have a great day!

8 thoughts on “Recover Audacity project from .au data files”

  1. Tommy Alfredsson

    Hi Kevin,

    I just read your article on sorting the project files in Audacity, i did try it but the files does not seem to sort themself in order. There are over 1200 files and almost 3hours of Podcast material..

    Is there any chance you could help me to take a look at this? I will of course pay you for for it.

    Best regards Tommy

    Reply ↓
  2. Hartmut Peters

    Hi Kevin,

    Greetings from Hartmut, a non-geek. This is a note RE “Recover Audacity project from .au data files”

    I did what you prescribed.
    1) The imported files were in the wrong sequence.
    2)Audacity said they were 44.1 kHz instead of the recorded 48 kHz.
    3) They were mono instead of the recorded stereo.

    The sequence of listed files under Windows 10 is curious. Windows power shell as well as a Cygwin shell produce what looks like a lexicographical sequence. Without file renaming, Audacity imports .au files in the same sequence. However, a win explorer window in “detail” mode produces a different sequence. Under cygwin, ls -t produces a different sequence than ls – but not what’s in the win explorer windows.

    Strange…

    Reply ↓
  3. Harry B

    You saved my life, thank you!!

    The additional problem I had was that my audio was in stereo, which meant that every six-second clip was imported twice (L and R channel). Before the Align End to End step, I had to go through all 256 tracks and merge every pair into a stereo track with the Make Stereo Track tool. Otherwise, I was able to follow this tutorial to a T.

    Reply ↓
  4. Victor

    I figured out this procedure on my own, then felt on your post.
    It did’t work for me, I got about 3 hours of recording, the 15 first minutes of “recovered data” sounds like my 3 hours with many many cut in the sound, after that a lot of blanks and also some sounds that are not in the right order.
    The timestamp of the file looks quite inacurate, at the least.
    I hoped that the .au file would contains information about it’s position in the sequence, but it seems not.

    Reply ↓
  5. Kurt

    Please make a video on youtube, where you show this step by step. Would really help a lot of people out there I think

    Reply ↓

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