I NEED HELP NOW!!!

[chronicmd]

here's my delimma- i had something like 11 tracks recorded. 7 for drums, 4 for guitars. i went and bounced it to disk so that i could burn the demo version of what i had just recorded. when i went into my disc burning application, i think that i accidentially deleted the actual session. everything has been deleted from the recycling bin. i still have all of the audio files, but i can't figure out how to make them back into the session that i had. my question is, is that even possible? can i somehow convert my audio files into the exact way they were in the session? i've been trying, but nothing seems to match up. there are 7 or 8 different files for each track recorded. is there some way i can group each of the 8 files into one file, returning it to how it was in the origional session, or am i basically screwed?

thanks.
jason

[chronicmd]

also, this just happened a few hours ago. is there any chance the session itself could still be in my computer somewhere that i haven't looked?

thanks

[Phil O'Keefe]

The session's probably gone... you can do a search for it, but if it is indeed gone and you have written anything to the hard drive since the deletion, chances are good that part or all of it wouldn't even be recoverable via software utilities.

DO NOT WRITE ANY FILE(S) TO THAT DISK if you want to have any chance of recovering the session. There are utilities that can search for deleted files and "restore" them, but it's not usually easily done if new files have been written to the disk.

Hopefully you'll see this right away... I'm posting now and hope you do - will post more in 5 minutes or so - hold on...

[Bastiaan]

If all these files are long ones, that came from a recording, and you didnt consolidate, edit or anything with it, then you could try creating a new session, choose "import audio to track", and grab all the files into a session. Listen to them, and remove the tracks with old takes. Then ofcourse you have to mix it again including all your plugins....(maybe you can use spot-mode to put them all at the right spot)

Do a search (windows) on ".pt" files. There should be a big big list, but maybe you saved it to some odd place.

I suggest - to prevent this in the future - to turn on the automatic backup feature. This will create several backup-files in a "session backup" folder to be able to step back....

[chronicmd]

i tried the search for .pt stuff...it wasn't there...the thing about it is that i recovered all the drum stuff. of the 8 audio files each track had, only audio file #5 had the whole song. each other file of the 8 had only segments. i thought it'd be the same for the guitar tracks, but it wasn't. none lined up the same way. they would be good at the beginning of the song, but by 1 minute into it, they'd be off...

thanks for getting back so fast. i really appreciate it.

[Bastiaan]

Have you tried "spotting" the files into place?

Switch to spot-mode (upper left corner), click on a region, and choose "original time-stamp"

I think this info is stored in the audio-file itself, so it's worth a shot...

[Phil O'Keefe]

Don't write anything to that disk - go get a copy of Ontrack Fix-It Utilities 4.0 - you can use it to recover deleted files - just as long as they have not been written over. Shouldn't cost you more than about $40, and a bit of your time.

It's available at all the main computer stores.

[Bastiaan]

Phil is right....better first try his idea's