Sliced up audio clip suddenly solid again

Did I trigger some arcane keybinding again?  I spent many hours slicing up a long audio track into hundreds of pieces, trimming them exactly, adding quick auto fades when needed to avoid clicks.  Suffice to say, this track Had to have that work done.  A perfectly set up gate could work, but this is more sure and permanent.
 
Suddenly, and without apparent warning, this 1 1/2 hour long vocal track (speaking) - became a solid clip again!  I panicked, tried various History restore points - nothing in the History took me back to before this problem.  But there's the original clip again, with all the godawful noise in-between phrases that I'd carefully sliced out - My main work output for yesterday and today.  It will take two days to re-do the work, unless I break down and try to get a gate to do the job as perfectly as I'd done.
 
Any ideas what the hell happened???
 
Randy

Lynn

I have to ask the obvious, did you save the project after editing?  If you saved the project and it still reverted back, then did you hit undo by accident?  If you have the gate that's available for Pro Channel, it works quite well and can save you a lot of time.  I wish that I could help more, Randy, but that's all I can come up with.  BTW, if you set up a gate properly, then you can process it with your clip and it will be permanent.  

Thanks for the reply, Lynn

It's a mystery really, but I suppose could be due to the project being so long, 1 1/2 hours.  We all do some slicing and dicing on a more limited scale, and we know that it's not destructive editing.  The deleted portions of an audio clip are still there, available again if we want.  But naturally we expect the visible editing in the track view to stay put.

In this case, many of the edits I'm talking about had been done the day before.  I opened the project to do more editing, and after a few hours of working, saving constantly, in a twinkling, the track was suddenly in its original unsliced form.  Nothing could bring back the edits.  It could be significant that a very complex volume envelope that had been recorded live on that track also bit the dust.

It's probably silly of me, but I just have a dislike of gates.  I don't trust a number of things that do work for us automatically, like I much prefer to ride the gain on a track rather than use a compressor.  I did try the Nomad gate on this after you inspired me to try the more sane gate solution again - It was OK, but with such a huge amount of material to work with, there were spots where the gate stuttered, using settings that worked fine for other sections.  I couldn't find settings that would work for the entire track, and as usual, the attack of a gate never sounds quite right to me.

Anyway - I've moved on - I should have divided this large project into several smaller ones, to be stitched together later.  My theory is that I was just working with too unwieldy a project.

Randy
 
 

listen
If I where to guess - with you saying the project is long, sounds like it may still be cut you just can't see it unless you expand the Wave Form way out....

That was a good thought, because probably all of us have seen waveforms being incorrectly displayed at times.  But in this case, the slices were definitely gone - my ears told me that before my eyes.  There's room noise between the speaker's phrases, that's what I was cutting out, and there it was again, distracting room noise between every phrase.
 
Randy