Hi all - Im admittedly a new user but am off to a quick start thanks to lots of PC DAW experience. Relying a little too heavily on N-Track’s auto-save feature, i closed down my tablet last night after tweaking some tracks, expecting to pop it back open tonight and resume working. Well, the song was gone. Even snapshots from yesterday are not restoring the tracks, comprised of several wav files and a couple midi. I’m at a total loss for where it all could have gone, being this has been a growing project over several days and as I said, I did nothing differently last night. Tried file manager searches for .sng files but that has been frustrating at best. Anyone ever have something like this occur and might have a suggestion? Many thanks in advance!
Did you loose the latest changes you did to a song or the whole song (i.e. along with its icon that appears on the song browser, tapping the home button in the lower right)?
n-Track saves songs by default periodically and when you exit/close the app (which should happen automatically when you close the device). Also when you close a song by tapping on the home button in the lower right the song is automatically saved.
If you inadvertently deleted a track in a song, you should be able to bring the track back using the undo button. Note that the undo works even after closing and reloading a song. Alternatively you can close the song, long press on the song icon, select ‘Restore snapshot’ and restore a previous version of the song.
Yet another alternative is if the track you’re missing is an audio track, use the + button below the last track, then select the Import audio option, then browse for the recorded wav file for the track inside the song’s Audio folder. The wav files in that folder are not deleted when you delete the track from the song.
You can find more info on how to manage songs and their files in this video tutorials.
Flavio.
Thanks so much for the reply! So i had lost the whole song. Multiple undos did no good ans could not find the WAV files. Then, i happened upon the trash in the n-Track folder, saw “_song.n-temp.sng” that just for fun i tried loading as an audio file which obviously didnt work. BUT…after doing that the thumbnail for my missing song now renamed as this temp file appeared in the song browser. So i selected it and was prompted “this item is in the trash. Put it back in its original location?” To which i eagerly tapped yes, only to be prompted "Can’t put back this item in its original location,please move it manually ". And of course, thanks to Google’s ridiculous Scoped Storage restrictions, i can’t get to the trash directory in the com.ntrack.studio.demo directory to move it. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated because I am very close! Thank you!
I don’t know why you are getting that error restoring the song from scratch. Check if a song with the same name as the song in the trash exists, in that case try renaming it. If you can connect the device to a PC you should be able to have full access to the app data folder. I believe that from within the device there is no way to have access the app’s private folder, because of the scoped storage limitations. Even if a song folder is in the trash you should still be able to import audio files from within its Audio subfolder (tap the + button to add a track, then browse to Trash → Song name → Audio.
Flavio.
Many thanks again, Flavio. So I tried what you described, found the file in trash and restoring, but the .sng file seemed to have lost all the midi files and linking to the .wav’s. So then I did the import of the .wav’s as you suggested and that worked. I then saved the song using the export & save feature to the SD card in my tablet, and now I get the message “Error: Error saving backup copy of song”. Very frustrating.
On a side note: I am lucky (I guess?) that this happened on literally the 2nd song I have put any work into in n-Track, because I have stopped recording anything new with it until I identify a reliable workflow that would avoid putting me in this situation again. For a program that is SO lovely in the implementation of so many features, it seems the most important, being saving your work, is horribly badly thought out.
I’m not sure if I understand what you mean by “I then saved the song using the export & save feature to the SD card in my tablet”, in which format did you export? You mean you saved the song to the SD card setting the app storage in the song browser to use the SD card, or you exported a wav/mp3/m4a or sgw file on the SD card? Do you still get the error if you use the default internal storage instead of the SD card?
If you restored the song by starting a new song and importing the audio files from the trash, you shouldn’t export to save the song, you can just tap the home button in the lower right and the song will be automatically saved. You can then rename the song tapping on the song name. If you want to make a backup copy, long press on the song thumbnail and select “Duplicate” from the popup menu. This is shown in the tutorial on the song browser I linked in an earlier post.
Flavio.