Any way to recover lost recording?

Question

I started a recording for a video in Audition (14.2.0.34) and noticed that the waveform looked a little off, so I stopped the recording and played it back to see if anything was concerning. I found no issues, so I hit record again, continuing from the end (or near-end) of the file.

2 hours later, I alt-tab back into Audition to see that it was started not responding occasionally and that most of the windowed were white. This wasn't an unusual occurrence with long recordings like this one. I'd usually just use Task Manager to 'End Task' and re-open the program, where it would prompt me asking whether I wanted to open the previous, unsaved recording. I'd open it, the full recording would be there and everything would be fine. This time, however, it reopened to only that short first recording where I had noticed something looking off, and then stopped the recording.

Is there any way to get the rest of that 2 hour recording back? I am fairly certain that the program was still recording when I closed it, as Task Manager was showing it using the usual amount of resources it does, and when it would occasionally snap out of not responding, the duration number by the file name would change.

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted Answer

Well I'm sorry, but your method of recording is really dodgy because it relies entirely on an interim save in a temp file; that's the way it works in Waveform view. And these intermediary files are vulnerable - just because they are temporary. It only takes one slip-up by the OS - generally in the form of active re-sizing - to cause a potential error in the Audition temp, because unless you moved the location of them, it's generally shared with an OS temp space anyway. It's not rare for recovered files to fail; if this hasn't happened to you before, you've been lucky.

And the Auditon temp file isn't one that an end-user can unlock. You only get one attempt at a recovery when you restart, and if you make a mistake anywhere in the process, you lose the file completely because it's automatically cleared out, just by virtue of closing it. Your problem is compounded by your restart - you haven't just got a single temp file now, but a secondary one as well. And that secondary one is extremely vulnerable. And as I said, if you've closed the file that you got back (the short one), the other will have been deleted automatically. So effectively there's nothing to recover - whatever you do.

The recommendation for many years now is to make all original recordings in Multitrack view, as those are written direct to file, and in the event of a crash, they can generally be recovered, even if you have to renew the headers. All restarts create a fresh file, so you lose nothing.

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Answer

Was this recording in Waveform view or Multitrack?

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