Linux Mint 17.3. I opened a large file in audacity. I did about an hour and a half of editing, with tracks added and numbers and titles.

I went to "export multiple" to save it to a folder with my file type and the export multiple window froze. The computer didn’t freeze, just audacity.

I don't want to lose all the work I just did. The whole project is just sitting there, I can't do anything with it.

Is there anything I can do to get my work back? If I restart, it says I'll lose my work.

It's late so I guess I'll leave my computer on all night to see if anything can be done to unfreeze it without losing all the work I did.

I did set a record. I went a week and a half without needing Windows. I guess I probably add "editing an audio file" to the list of things you need a Windows computer to do.

Thank you for any help.

Chris.

you know that you can save your work as an audacity project, right?
maybe it's blocked until the export has finished? bummer. one would have to figure out how to cancel the export without killing audacity.

I gave up and killed audacity. When I opened it back up, it asked if I wanted to restore my previous session. I clicked yes and it opened it back up. I had to do it a few more times, as it froze again.

I searched and found audacity has a lot of problems with linux. I found a few who said they only use it in Windows now.

I got through the problem and didn't have to start over each time. That was my main concern. Don't want to chance it if I do a lot of work. Looks like I'll just have to reboot into Windows when I want to edit files.

Thanks for the reply,


Chris.

Audacity tends to do a lot of things in RAM so if it doesn't have RAM, it fails. It also has issues with large files. Especially those > 4GB in size. I tend to use a combination of libsndfile, sox, and audacity when doing edits on large files. Breaking a stereo track into two mono tracks is one way to help on the large file issue. But that means editing each individually. Audacity also tends to make copies of your large audio files in /tmp/ when you make edits. So you might need to save and reload to keep that /tmp/ usage in a sane range. I remember making sure I had at least 40GB of free space before using audacity for anything serious. Audacity has other annoyances like recording to RAM which has issues if you run out of RAM or lose power. Ardour records to disk, so it's a much saner choice when recording. Although the editing options in audacity are very nice.

I regularly use Audacity on Linux to record podcasts for Hacker Public Radio; my typical finished product is between an 15 and 35 minutes long. I am hardly an Audacity expert, but I have been doing this for five years.

I have occasionally encountered freezes, but, when I have, Audacity has successfully recovered the files on restart. Maybe I've been lucky, but, with complex projects, I still believe in "save early and often."

I commonly save the projects in Audacity's default format (saving along the way after particularly complex edits). I do not export to other format(s) until I am satisfied with the finished product in Audacity.

Thank you for the replies. I got the impression at the time that I was doing things to quick. I've done stuff in audacity for so long, at times, full time, that I got pretty quick at doing things.
I'd be clicking this and using keyboard short-cuts for that and freeze.

Chris.