How to make use of project.xml

I’m using audacity-project-tools to recover a broken project file. It’s not clear to me what triggered the file to be broken to begin with - everything was fine, I saved and exited the program as usual, and when I reopened it I got the error “audacity failed to read a file in…”

I have not had any luck with the recommended commands “-drop_autosave” (the resulting file still cannot be opened) and “-recover_db -recover_project” (the resulting file opens, but is empty). It passes -check_integrity. I tried all the other commands listed on the Github repo, and the only one that seemed promising was -extract_project, which yields a project.xml file that seems to have meaningful information that references the correct source files etc. However, when I try to import this as “raw data” I just get a lot of screeching sounds, and the project structure does not resemble what was lost.

What kind of things should I be able to do with the recovered project.xml file? I like to believe that I can use this xml file to rebuild the project in combination with the original source files (I did not record directly into Audacity, the original wavs are all intact). Is this the case?

(Originally posted to the Audacity forums, unfortunately it was incorrectly marked as spam and unlisted so I'm trying here instead)

Start with the repository documentation and the documented commands -extract_project, -drop_autosave, -recover_db, -recover_project, and -check_integrity. Determine and document what the recovered project.xml contains, whether it can be combined with the intact WAV files, and what limitations apply. Done means a user can understand the supported recovery workflow and expected results.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.