Garageband ate a recording!

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Level 1

5 points

Garageband ate a recording!

My sister has been working long and hard to edit an interview for a podcast. She finished (except for some fine-tuning, and adding a few more pictures) late last night, saved her project, and quit. Today, when she opened the podcast, she found a long stretch of the conversation she'd recorded and edited was simply gone! I suggested that she repeatedly "undo" to get back to where/when it might have vanished, even though this might also undo some of her graphics and editing. But she told me she'd already tried, to no avail. Where can this sound file be, and how can she get it back into her podcast?? She is exhausted and desperate. TIA!

Her machine is a fairly new macbook pro, running Lion. I'm not sure whether she's running Garageband 9 or 11.

I am going to suggest that she repair permissions a couple of times and then reboot, but I don't want her to lose anything else. Is there anything else we can do?

Mary

Posted on Jan 8, 2013 11:50 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

194,647 points

Jan 8, 2013 12:16 PM in response to maryj59

Mary,

all recordings are saved in the GarageBand project - the xxxx.band file she created. If she did not actually save the project after deleting a recording, she may be able to retrieve the recording by opening the .band file.

ctrl-click the project file.
Select "Show package contents" from the pop-up menu, then look into the folders inside. The folder "Media" should hold the actual audio recording. Is the original recording still there? Then copy it to the Desktop.
Does your sister have her Mac backing up to TimeMachine? If the drive has been connected, there should be hourly backups and she might be able to retrieve her work from the backup.

Regards

Léonie

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Answer 2

maryj59 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 8, 2013 12:25 PM in response to léonie

Thank you, Leonie! Deirdre has been reading the boards and she did tell me she was going to try control-clicking on the file, as you suggested. Unfortunately, she doens't have Time Machine going, as far as I know. (I have it, both at home and at work, and it's saved my bacon a couple of times.) I will let you know what success she has. Really hoping she can find the file, since this was a really special interveiw and podcast, and she is so conscientious about her editing.

BTW, if she does find the file, does she need to lock her soundtracks to keep this from happening again?

Thanks!

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Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

194,647 points

Jan 8, 2013 1:33 PM in response to maryj59

BTW, if she does find the file, does she need to lock her soundtracks to keep this from happening again?

It is hard to tell, from what you told us, how the recordings went missing, so I cannot say what will prevent it from happening again.

The savest thing would be to make a copy of the project, before she starts editing. This way she always will have a backup version to fall back on, if something goes wrong. Also frequently saving the project and keeping intermediate versions will help a lot.

If her disk is not very full, and she has not done much editing, she might be able to recover the audio using recovery software. I once could restore photos using Disk Drill: http://www.cleverfiles.com/

but I never tried it for audio files.

Regards

Léonie

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Answer 4

maryj59 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 9, 2013 1:17 PM in response to léonie

Thanks again. Unfortunately, this will not work, because, as I said originally, my sister did days and days worth of editing on this file. She was not able to find it - we don't know where it went. On the plus side, she did have the original recording saved, so she just has to re-edit everything. Heartbreaking, but not as bad as losing the interview altogether.

This actually happened on her work macbook, not the macbook pro. Probably she was running Garageband 9.

Thanks again for trying to help!

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