Power Outage While Recording - Now File crashes

[Robbie_2327]

I was recording an alt mix of a track I had finished when my power went out. I rebooted and noticed first that my mouse settings had changed (the mouse speed was slower) and my view in my finder windows had changed.

I reopened the DP Project but when I hit play I get a beach ball for about 10 seconds and then DP crashes. I trashed my DP preferences files (I think), rebooted again but still same problem.

I opened a different project that I had recently done and that one seemed to work fine.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Robbie

[James Steele]

Well, if you were using Time Machine or had some sort of recent backup, you might have to go with the last backup you had.

Otherwise, you could try to create a New project and then use the Load command to load the old projects main sequence chunk into the new project. Sometimes that will work. I hope you can recover it.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I won't put my machine on anything but a battery backup power supply for that very reason. If your work is important to you, get one and be sure it can more than handle the load.

[Gravity Jim]

I won't put my machine on anything but a battery backup power supply for that very reason. If your work is important to you, get one and be sure it can more than handle the load.

Roger that. The file you were recording is now a corrupted mess and that's probably why the project won't open.

Back in the day, a Uninterruptible Power Supply that would produce clean sine-wave power (and thereby not create digital hash in your audio) was stupid expensive. Now they're almost as cheap as the crappy square-wave units. For 150 bucks, I bought a UPS that will run my computer, both displays, and my console and interface for a full 20 minutes in the event of a power outage. Best money I ever spent.

[philbrown]

Besides what James said, you could also try going to the Audio Files folder for that project and trash the audio file that's corrupted (if it's even there) then try opening the DP file. You probably have BOTH a corrupted audio file and a corrupted DP file so James' suggestion might be the only option.

[Robbie_2327]

Thanks for the input guys. Unfortunately I don't have a recent back up of the project. I did look for the corrupted audio file in the audio folder but didn't see it in there. Also, just to be clear, I can open the project. I was even able to bounce one of my other stems down to an mp3. The mp3 came out just fine but yet when I go into the file and hit play DP hangs up and crashes. I haven't tried to see if the other chunks inside this project are working or not yet.

I think that I need to invest in one of those battery backup systems to prevent this from happening again

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Have you deleted the DP plists files?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Also the Analysis files.

[billf]

From the description in your OP, it sounds like you had no UPS backup system and the Mac went out with power, therefore no time to do a save file, quit, and shutdown. Correct?

If so, several common things that can happen are:

1. Your OSX file systems got hosed.

2. Your data files that were opened are damaged.

3. Hardware damage, although from your description it doesn't sound like this occurred, fortunately.

Here are some things to try:

1. Boot in Safe Mode.

2. Run Disk Utility and repair the disk (note: this needs to be done from your DVD installer or thumb drive). If file structures were damaged, this will repair them and might be enough.

3. If neither of the above work, you can run a tool like this and see if it helps. It's somewhat expensive, but depending on the severity of your problem, it might be worth a look.

4. Invest in UPS. Now. Do not wait, do not pass Go. Get one now, and make sure it is rated high enough to keep your rig going for enough time to allow you to properly shut down during an unexpected outage.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

If any app, including the system, was writing to disk for any reason at the time of outage, it could have damaged the disk. billf's suggestion to run diagnostics if a good idea.