Are you looking to restore .sesx files or audio files from Adobe Audition? We feel your pain—working hard on an audio project only to lose your progress can be devastating. While you may import some files and apply simple edits, there’s no replacement for the intricacy of carefully mixing the recorded audio. Luckily, there’s no need to try to make up for lost work until you exhaust the options below. Although not their best-known software, the company tries its best to help the users. Now, let’s go over how to recover Adobe Audition files.
1. Restore saved data from a previous Adobe Audition session
We go over the manual and auto-saving of projects in Adobe Audition. Then, we will show you how to restore from a backup Adobe Audition made. Let’s begin.
Important. Many projects fail to be saved in the Waveform view until you save the project manually or extract audio files. If you closed the software (or it crashed) in Multitrack/Edit view, your chances are much higher because it records files straight to disk.
Saving Audition presets and projects
The first advice new audio editing courses teach you is to save often, which works via the Control + S or Command + S button combinations in Windows and Mac. Additionally, Adobe Audition saves your session in certain periods based on your settings that you can configure by:
- Clicking on Edit in the top menu.
- Going to Preferences. You can also use the Control + , (comma) or Command + , shortcuts on Windows and Mac respectively.
- Switching to the Auto Save tab in the left sidebar.
- Setting up the “Auto save recovery data every X minutes” setting where X is the number of minutes.
- Make sure “Backup Audition Multitrack data automatically” is enabled (has a checkmark in front).
- Click on OK.
This setting will be useless unless enabled before you lost your audio data. Thus, treat it as a failsafe for the future. For those that did so, it tells them how far the rollback of data goes. We will also explain how to check autosaves that go even further in time, although not by much.
Opening from a saved Audition multitrack session
With the above acknowledged, if you don’t get a pop-up in your current session, close Adobe Audition including using Task Manager → Processes or Force Quit Utility on Mac. Once you start it again you should see the “Previous Session Detected” window and can select the Continue Now option. Give the software a moment, and you should be able to continue where you left off.
2. Manually restore Adobe Audition files from a .sesx backup
Adobe Audition lets you save a current session as a .sesx file. It doesn’t contain any audio files, making it lightweight and easy to store. As a reminder, you can save data to a .sesx file by:
- Clicking on File in the menu at the top.
- Selecting Export.
- Choosing the Session option.
- Activating the Save Copies Of Associated Files option if possible.
- Clicking on Options and configuring the settings before saving the .sesx file. Since this file was introduced with Audio Audition 3.0 in 2007, it will work for sessions even decades old.
If you can remember doing this in the past, we have great news. You can go to File → Import → select the .sesx file to restore a session. The only downside is that the multitrack session project saves data in an XML (Extensible Markup Language) format. That means it will only memorize the locations of audio files such as RMI, MID, AVI, WMV, MOV, WAV, OGG, MP3, and so on. Thus, they must be in the original data path to be imported.
3. Search for Adobe Audition files in a temporary folder
We understand that not everyone creates backups. Similarly, we know that sometimes the software recognizes an empty session as the latest one and that the one before that may be the desired one. These problems render both methods above obsolete. Luckily, we have a solution.
Where to find temporary Adobe Audition files
Adobe Audition saves several temporary files for old sessions, and you can find them here:
- Windows — C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp\Adobe\Audition\11.0
- Mac — ~Library/Preferences/Adobe/Audition/11.0
The name of the folder differs based on your version of Adobe Audition. Also, you may need to enable hidden files and extensions to see the files titled AudxA1234.tmp, where 1234 represents random numbers assigned to a temporary file. For instance, the latest file may be named AudxA6455.tmp. Use the “Date Modified” category and size to find the file corresponding to your desired audio editing session. If you didn’t find them there, they were not saved. However, you can try to click on Preferences → Media and Disk Cache → Temp inside the Audition to look for some data saved in Waveform view.
Recover temporary files from Adobe Audition projects
Once you have the temporary data, you can follow these steps to recover the Adobe Audition session from a temporary file:
- Copy the .tmp file to you desktop or a different location to create a backup.
- Open Adobe Audition and click Continue Later when the “previous session detected” window pops up.
- Click File in the top menu.
- Go to Open…
- If you’re on Windows, select the “PCM Raw Data (*.wav, *.pcm, *.raw)” under Files of type to narrow down the search. Otherwise, pick the Raw Data option.
- Click the Open button.
- Select the Sample rate, Channels, Encoding, Bit Depth, and Resolution that matches your audio project and click OK. Try to get this right, otherwise, your project will sound weird.
- If you don’t understand this setting or can’t remember, leave the “Data Formatted As” setting to the default values. Click OK again.
- Adobe Audition will now open the session. If it’s the correct one, save it manually to create a backup. Otherwise, close the program and open another .tmp file.
4. Use data recovery software to recover Adobe Audition audio files
If all three methods fail, your last resort is to download reliable data restoration software for Windows or Mac. The best are available for both platforms. Then, you can recover .sesx or .tmp files from Audio Audition via data recovery software like this:
- Download, install and launch the data rescue application you chose.
- Select whether you want to scan your entire hard drive or a specific location such as the two in method 3.
- Choose Scan and select Deep/Full Scan if offered a choice.
- After scanning finishes, we suggest using the search bar to enter “.sesx” or “.tmp”.
- Put checkmarks in front of discovered files and select Recover, then select a location.
- Import those files into Adobe Audition.
