How to recover a creashed Audacity recording

[kdheart]

I recently had Audacity crash just as I stopped a recording and was about to save the project.
It usually recovers what you were working on when you restart it, so I wasn't particularly worried... Until I was greeted with a text box that said that it recovered to the last snapshot of the project and behind it, an empty project.



The best piece of advice for this situation I could find online was to find the temp file for the project and save it somewhere else as back-up. Nothing else I could find (change the extension name from aup3unsaved to aup3 and do the same for the other additional files - by cutting out the unsaved part of the extension - and open it directly in Audacity, or importing the temp file - which registers as an incompatible format), so I saved the temp files and decided to deal with it later.

After stepping away for a few days and spending a few hours playing around with various settings, I managed to recover a slightly damaged version of the recording (it's ok, the damage is mostly annoying)

problem: recording crashes before you can save or export it and when you try to recover it on opening audacity, you're greeted with an empty project
what to do:

1. Don't exit Audacity!!! you might lose the temp file
2. Set Windows Explorer to show hidden files
3. Go to C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData and copy the three temp files for the most recent session to some place else (preferably, zip them together to make sure they won't go anywhere)
4. Open Audacity
5. File > Import > Raw Data and import the unsaved project from where you put your copy of it
6. You might need to fiddle with the settings on import (for some reason, this was saved at 22050Hz and you might need to change Byte order to Default endianness. If you get the rate wrong, you can change that in the project, afterwards)
7. You're probably going to get one huge file of everything that's been recorded that day, with gaps and glitches between sections of recording
8. Split stereo to mono and get rid of the channel with the egregious glitches
9. Export the file in a lossless format
10. You can deal with editing it later. At least you got your recording back

This is what the recovered audio looked like, before I did anything to it. (Ignore the 32-bit float part. This was an earlier recovery, before I remembered to change it to 16-bit and figured out the ratio)