Audacity crashed when I was trying to maximize its window, so I lost some audio. When I restarted Audacity, it informed me that the audio might be in temp files, but Audacity can’t recover them automatically.

A quick Google Search found me this good wiki page on Windows Bugs. There’s also an FAQ page on the subject. But the real key was this Crash Recovery page in the wiki.

Some wonderful person wrote a Recovery Utility, and it really works! Some audio I was working with previously was garbled, but the stuff I wanted was all there!

Note: You don’t have to do the Left and Right balance, Export to WAV exercise he describes. At least in Audacity 1.2.6, you can just click the drop-down for the track and click “Convert to Stereo”. Somehow Audacity is smart enough to pick up the channel below it as the Right channel. (Drag the tracks around to make sure the tracks are in the right order first.) This only applies if you were recording in Stereo, i.e. 2 tracks.

Sidenote: One really annoying thing, which still happens in Windows Vista, although it might be program-specific (it at least applies to Macromedia Fireworks 8): in the Save dialog box, when I click a filename, it goes into the filename box. If I edit this and try to save, it somehow thinks it’s still the old filename and warns that I’ll be overwriting it. Oh no! That’s not what I want to do. So I cancel, click away from the file, and edit the filename again. What a waste of time…