DISASTER [SOLVED]! Please help me find and restore my LOST audio clips. X3e

System
X3e 64
Win 7 64
i7 2600k
2 x 7200 Barricuda drives (this project was being run from and recorded into ONLY the C drive)
16GB Corsair Vengeance RAM
Focusrite Scarlett 18i6
Focusrite VRM Box attached and active VIA SPDIF (but bypassed via the VRM software... this is a new device on my rig)
 
What happened...
 
As I said I had returned to an old project to clean it up. After which point I was going to start working on it again. I did a little bit of cleanup/reorganizing into the new Save As "Clean Up" but then got off track and started recording into the project. I did not do anymore Save As's after that instead just saving into that project (STUPID).
 
I did a bunch of guitar takes into a new track (outboard effects). That track seems to be intact because I was not editing it. After that I realized my original guit takes could be better (dual recorded clean tracks for amp sims). I recorded a bunch of takes into the existing tracks (these are the tracks where the clips are missing).
 
After getting a bunch of really good takes and making notes for them all to prepare for comping today I created song segment markers and made my comp splits. For some reason (and I posted about this last week) this project has decided to ignore the record grouping I thought I had enabled (I probably screwed something up but I think this may be part of the problem that led to the crash). So I manually sliced everything up across the two sets of clean/sim tracks and the outboard effects track one at a time so they all matched (because the clips weren't properly grouped and it was refusing to allow me to create new groups for some screwy reason).
 
I went through the comping process and got a really nice sounding selection but it was a general comp. I wanted to tighten up the fades and splits.
 
This is where the trouble began...
 
I had about 7-10 splits in the project. I had only really had about half of those where I actually strayed from the one best track. Because my clip grouping had failed and I wanted all the changes to be represented in both tracks I selected both of the tracks so that any changes made to one would effect to other (of course this selected all the clips in both tracks). I adjusted the first split/fade no problem...
 
THEN when I moved to the second split things went all funky. I had been zoomed way in so I could not see what was happening beyond the first fade. When I zoomed out everything after the second fade was GONE and I was getting erratic screen behavior. It looked like maybe the clips just weren't rendering and that maybe they were still there (I could see little lines where I thought the splits had been but they had actually been moved to AFTER the end of the project). I closed the project and reopened it hoping it was just a glitch. No dice, same deal. So I tried to slip edit one of the slivers thinking somehow the clips had somehow slip edited themselves to slivers and BOOM.... full crash, windows reporter pops up then the Cake crash reporter thing. 
 
I saved the crash report (wherever those things get saved by default) and opened the project again to see what I could see. I zoomed WAY in to the slivers (which did seem to represent the original splits but were WAY off from where they had been originally... almost like they had all be dragged to the end of the project which was about a 2.5-3 minute project and now was 5.5-6 min project) and sure enough the crossfades were there but no audio.
 
So it retained and moved the splits/x-fades but not the acutal audio. I do not think I hit any weird key combos and I have no idea what keybinding would cause such mayhem. I can only guess that maybe it was trying to apply my x-fade edits to ALL the splits at once across both tracks (because everything was selected) then threw up on itself.
 
So yeah... likely my fault for trying to force that type of editing but I though it would be fine.
 
Anyway... I just need to find my tracks.
 
Ugh... sorry, I R dumb.

bapu
Sounds like you've somehow deleted something from the "audio" folder of the project. Check the recycle bin?

Not in the recycle bin but perhaps you can help with my next question which I'll adress to Clint...
 

clintmartin
I had this happen once and I found all of my .wav files in the .cwp audio folder. Good luck.

Hi, Clint. Thanks. I figured it would be something like that so now I need help on tracking down the specific WAVs within the folder.
 
I have the Audio folder open for this project but because of how many takes I've made in this project the list is huge.
 
What I need to know is how in the heck do I get Windows 7 to sort these by date? If I could figure that out I could easily identify them by the dates they were created. However Windows is "helpfully" treating these like my freaking Tunes library and only showing "Artist, Title, Album" and crap like that. I just need the date.
 
Honestly as much as I love Win7 there is a whole pile of dumb crap like this it does by default that really peeves me off (like hiding file extensions by default which I just learned about the other and had been driving me nuts for years).
 
Thanks so much for popping in. Cheers, bud.

Wav files are saved when recorded, so check the audio folder as Clint mentioned. Without the cwp, editing would have to be re-done which may be painful.

mettelus
Wav files are saved when recorded, so check the audio folder as Clint mentioned. Without the cwp, editing would have to be re-done which may be painful.

Thanks, yeah I've got it open and I think they are in there. I just need to figure out how to sort all the entries by date. I do see that X3 has added numbers in parentheses at the end of each entry that I may be able to sort through but they are not the numbers that appeared in the clips which I'm actually quite familiar with in this project now (for example I know that Recording 14 in both screwy tracks was my main take but these numbers are (2135) and the like).
 
I guess I can sort through these one at a time but seriously if I could just sort by date I could copy all the relevant ones and import them.
 
Cheers.

.

Beepster

John

Beepster

John
Have you checked the audio folder in the project folder? Your wav files should be there. 

Yeah, I've got it open but there is so much in there and I can't figure it out based on the wav names. I need the sort by date function in the Windows Explorer window.... which I can't seem to figure out.
 
Any thoughts? Win 7 BTW.
 
Hi John and thanks.

If there is no date created column add it by right clicking on the area of the column headings. You then click on the arrow to sort it by date.  You should be in details view.

Okay... I'm going to swear now but it is a swear of great success...
 
F*CK YEAH!!!
 
It's still going to be weird because of how Sonar seems to have titled things but I can now clearly see what dates the waves were created and they sync up to the days I was tracking. Brilliant!!
 
Thanks, now to devise a plan to get them into a project that ain't gonna barf on itself.

Hey don't do that! You are only allowed to see them not actually use them.

scook
The media browser browser can show sortable detail columns too.

Oh, yeah. That's awesome. I wasn't even thinking about cruising around these files from within the browser. I was just going to drag them in the old clunky Windows way but if this works it should be significantly easier.
 
Problem is that these are all takes of the exact same same part and... well I play pretty tight so the comp was more to sort out VERY subtle nuances. It's gonna be hard to decipher what's what but the dates might help and if I undock the browser I can cross reference the numbers in parentheses in the title with the dates recorded.
 
IDK... I gotta paly with it.
 
Great stuff, guys.

John
They would need to be Broadcast wave files for there to be a timestamp. Sonar can create broadcast wave files. Its not the default though.   

D'oh... yeah that makes sense. Thanks.

It is possible to uncover deleted objects on a hard drive. I've done it in the case of a memory card from a camera being wiped out. I used Linux to do the trick. Basically, I booted to Linux, put in the memory card and had it read all the memory on the card and look for objects.
 
On a hard drive, this will be a massive enterprise because you will find SOOOO MANY OBJECTS!
 
http://www.byclouder.com/products/recovery/audio-file-recovery.html
 
This claims to be able to do the trick for WAVE files.

You right click on the info bar and can add or subtract any of the details. This goes back to W98 I think. 
The defaults are stupid like Artist? Album and stuff. Just uncheck all the useless ones and add the ones you need. 
Sort by Type - Handy for separating MP3 from Wave files 
Sort by Size used to be a good way to look for large files that are wasting space. 
And sort by date has always been a great way to find lost files if you happen to know the date.