Hello! I am having a bit of trouble. Last night, I setup Audacity to record the radio station in my area. I selected Stereo Mix at my input, ran a few tests, and saw they sounded okay. I went to bed, and went to school the next day. I just ended the recorded about an hour ago. I saved the audacity file. It ended up being about a 20 hour recording.
Now, here is the issue. I went to playback a random bit in the middle, and heard a lot of choppiness. A lot: http://imposinghosting.com/e0022ab0.wav. I quit out of audacity, and reopened my project file, to be greeted with the follow message:
“Project check of 1-7-14_data” folder found 20169 orphan block file(s). These files are unused by this project, but may belong to other projects. They are doing no harm and are small." I selected the “continue without deleting; ignore the extra files this session” option, and my main recording was gone. Ex: http://gyazo.com/ea2593140ebb037c9753a1584b8a0e3a. I checked, and all of the data files are there, but as you can hear above, most are choppy. Choppy in Audacity playback and choppy in exports. However, the earlier files are not choppy. I read that there is some type of technical limits about recording for more than 6 hours, which might be what happened to me.
This audio means a lot to me - I was on it throughout the day. I am willing to try anything to get these files sounding somewhat normal. Any information you need, just ask. I appreciate the help!
Earlier Audacity versions had a 13 hour Project limit assuming Audacity sound defaults. WAV file format has a 4 GB top limit and sometimes as little as 2GB.
Do you leave your computer doing other stuff during the night? Conflicts and filling up the hard drive may be what’s causing the damaged sound file snippets.
Fill in the numbers from the pink band at the top of this message.
I got burned with the Audacity Timer tool when I accidentally made the times of day “pass” each other. Start 14:45:50 Stop 14:45:47. I quickly corrected my error and didn’t see that Audacity automatically rolled to the next Day in order to accommodate the times — and didn’t roll back.
Hi koz. The computer was left running all night, as usual. It had about 24GB of RAM free, and the CPU load was averaging 12%. You can see my specs here: http://jacobhartmann.me/specs.txt
The drive I was recording to was connected SATA III, with 1.5TB free.
What do you mean to fill in the numbers? Are you referring to the “This forum is for Audacity 2.x on Windows.”?
If so, I am running Windows 7 Ultimate, Service Pack 1. My audacity version is 2.0.5, installed through the exe (from my memory).
Then almost certainly you are using Audacity 2.0.5 or earlier and have been hit by the bug that you cannot reopen projects containing audio over a certain length - the length limit is shorter the higher the project rate is. See Missing features - Audacity Support.
Even if you the project reopens as recorded, you can’t fix the problem once it’s recorded like that.
What project rate were you recording at (see bottom left)? 44100 Hz or 48000 Hz is good. Higher rates put the computer under increasing strain (because of the increasing amount of data being transported/read/written), without there being a significant audible increase in quality even if it records correctly.
Are you sure you quit 2.0.5? If you launch 2.0.6 with 2.0.5 still running, you will only get a new project window in 2.0.5.
Otherwise if there is enough good audio in the project, you could try Audacity Manual. This involves sorting the AU files by time, then renaming the files so they have a consistent naming sequence.
You should have a load of “d” folders in the “e00” folder inside the _data folder for the project. The best way is probably to make a new folder, then empty the contents of “d00”, “d01”, “d02” and “d03” into the new folder. Then as described in the link, do the sort and rename of the AU files and run the 1.2 Recovery Utility on those files to make a mono or stereo WAV file. Then repeat for the subsequent “d” folders.
I have a question about the renaming, though. So I have d00, d0a, d0b, etc… to d61. So what I need to do, is take all the .au files from those folders, and put it in just one, right? So just getting rid of the sub-folder structure? I just want to ensure I don’t mess this up further than it is.
Thank you, and once clarified, I will do the whole rename thing.
Yes you don’t need the subfolder structure of 256 files per subfolder. However the recovery utility tends to choke on more than about 1000 files, so that’s why I suggested working on no more than the contents of four subfolders at a time.
You can call the subfolders containing 1024 AU files what you like as long as they have the AU files time sorted and renamed and no subfolders within that. The aim is to generate a WAV file (or two files for stereo) from each subfolder of 1024 files then join the WAV files together.
Note that the d0a folder doesn’t come after d00 in time sequence - the sequence goes d00, d01, d02, d03,…d09, d0a, d0b, d0c, d0d, d0e, d0f, d10, d11… and so on. But you should be able to tell that from the timestamps of the AU files.
I am not sure exactly what you mean but you can choose what files to time-sort, rename and recover to WAV. So you could start with the end of the recording if you preferred.
I’m glad you recovered the audio but as I said, you can’t fix the problem once it’s recorded with dropouts. That part of the problem is a problem with your computer. Missing features - Audacity Support.