How to recover lost audio samples in OSX?

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Wilco75
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Joined: Wed Mar 02, 2011 8:27 am

How to recover lost audio samples in OSX?

Post by Wilco75 » Sun Apr 29, 2012 6:24 am

This Friday (April 27th 2012) I was working in Ableton live on a standard "new" set when I stumbled upon some cool sounds and thought I'd record my ideas quickly while I improvised a bit. I ended up making one of those "once in a lifetime, unplanned, unable to reproduce" recordings about 5 min long. I decided to save it as it's own project and then continued working. Came up with some new ideas and instead of opening a new file, decided i'd delete the audio samples I'd recorded and just "save as" a new project when I was finished. Of course, my reflexes got the best of me and I "cmd saved" instead. I immediately realized my mistake and entered Time Machine to see if the snapshot could help me. There I found the orignal set from an hour or so earlier and thought to restore, but realized that this would probably overwrite the new recording I'd made on the same set. I went back to Ableton and resaved with a new file name. Then upon restoring the old set from TM I got a message asking if I wanted to replace the existing file. I think I answered yes here and then the restore failed. Odd thing too was that the file in the hour old snapshot had the new name. (?)

I paniced and since I had to catch a bus to work, I shut off Time Machine to stop anymore snapshots from being made (for some reason, my system only has one or two at a time when I enter TM) and the critical one being erased. I realize now that this was a mistake as it erased my snapshots.

So I sat most of last night and a bit today with Data Drill and Stellar Phoenix and can't seem to find anything that will help me. I don't know where to look or how to find what I'm lookig for of course. Data Drill doesn't even show file names and of the over 1000 .wav files it finds, none of them play back without screaming noise/distortion.

Stellar Phoenix provides a better front end but I still can't seem to find any files from the right time period. (not only that, but there are files dated 01/01/1904!?!)

I figure that if the powers that be are able to recover erased/overwritten files then the information must be here somewhere. I've been trying to locate old snapshots in the snapshots.

What's even wierder is that now even the new samples I recorded are missing in Ableton. They were there last night while I was trying to fix everything. I was even able to listen to the set. Now the samples are all gone. They show up as "missing files" in Abletons native Project Manager, but they're nowhere to be found.

Any tips on how I could use these recovery programs to get these files back would be appreciated.

Valiumdupeuple
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Re: How to recover lost audio samples in OSX?

Post by Valiumdupeuple » Sun Apr 29, 2012 6:21 pm

Strange, they should be in your project folder somewhere if you didn't promptly ake Live to delete unused files. Have you tride manual searching? Have a look through the finder.
If they're not in the project "sample>recorded" folder, then there's a good chance they're inside a temporary set. The temporary folder is where you have define its location within Live's preferences. Set are named "Temp-X Project" by default.

Wilco75
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Mar 02, 2011 8:27 am

Re: How to recover lost audio samples in OSX?

Post by Wilco75 » Tue May 01, 2012 5:06 pm

Valiumdupeuple wrote:Strange, they should be in your project folder somewhere if you didn't promptly ake Live to delete unused files. Have you tride manual searching? Have a look through the finder.
If they're not in the project "sample>recorded" folder, then there's a good chance they're inside a temporary set. The temporary folder is where you have define its location within Live's preferences. Set are named "Temp-X Project" by default.

Thanks, they don't seem to be there. all that's there is a Project8_1.cfg actually. No samples. How does it work with the temp files? I've got folder there numbered 1-18. Judging by the dates, #17 should be the right one. Seeing as I saved the work, I imagine the samples were moved from the temp file to the new projec location. When I load the project, the audio samples are missing and it finds no candidates to replace. Strange, I know. Is there I can do with that config file?

Theo Void
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Re: How to recover lost audio samples in OSX?

Post by Theo Void » Wed May 02, 2012 4:57 am

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