3.0.0 freezes during compression on a 4 hour file

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

First of all, thanks for the new version! :smiley:

I imported a 5.1 file into the new version and downconverted it to stereo, which it did fine.
Then i did the standard ‘effects - dynamic range compression’ and after about 20 seconds it froze and returned to the previous state of the file.

I then exported the uncompressed stereo file to wav, also no problem.

Closed audacity, opened it up again, imported the stereo wav file and when i tried to compress it again the same thing happened; froze after a short while and than it undid the compression and went back to the file.

I’ve reinstalled 2.4.2 and the compression works fine on the big file there, so it’s not an issue of a full SSD drive or lack of memory i think.

WIndows 10 home edition, 8 gig ram memory, i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40 GHz.

Cheers!

2

Which effect are you using for that?
This one: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/compressor.html
or some other compressor? (which?)

3

Chris’s Dynamic Compressor, 1.2.6 i believe.

4

If I recall correctly, that plug-in fails if the selection is too long.
How long is the track that you are trying to process?

Unfortunately we can’t ask Chris about the problem as he is no longer living.

5

Sorry to hear that.

The track is about 4 hours long, it’s an audio track from a veeery long movie. I think it fails on shorter files as well, not sure.

It works in 2.4.2 though.

6

It’s a little rough to get a plug-in or series of tools that does the same jobs as Chris. His design metaphor is unique. Can you split the job in two and do it in halves?

I do know of one problem Chris has. He uses uncontrolled look-ahead and doesn’t like running off the end of a sound file (Wile E. Coyote and the cliff). Do you intentionally put Unimportant Stuff on the ends of your show so he has something to chew on while he’s sorting it all out?

I used Chris for years and never caught on because I always did trimming after compressing. You can run into serious sound problems if you apply Chris as a last pass process with no trimming.

Koz

7

“Chris’s Dynamic Compressor, 1.2.6” works for me with Audacity 3.0.0 (I’ve only tested on a short track)

8

Just tested Chris’s with a 5 min stereo file with 3.0.0 - worked for fine

Then tried a 3 hour stereo file - this bombed out with no error message part way through.

Peter.

9

Haven’t run into any problems with this compressor before really, i mainly use it for compressing audio (no trimming) where dialog is inaudible vs the huge explosions in films and series. It works fine with older verions of Audacity. Hmmm…

Yes, it seems to work on shorter files but:

Yep, same as me.

10

Same problem here. 90min track and Chris’ compressor bombs out. Weirdly though, it also does this using default compressor too. Normalise and limiter were working but now both stop with no visible change to wav file.

Everything worked fine before upgrading to 3.0.0.

Any suggestions please?

11

Check that the track does not start before time=0.
There’s a bug that occurs in the built-in compressor when it is applied to audio that is in “negative time”.

For Nyquist plug-in effects, there’s a bug in Audacity 3.0.0 that causes them to silently fail on long tracks. In most cases (but not all cases) that is tracks longer than about 45 minutes. This has been fixed for the next version of Audacity (3.0.1) which is scheduled for release next month. The workaround for now is to process long tracks in sections.

12

I’ve just QA tested Compressor on W1o with the latest alpha test build for 3.0.1 on a three hour stereo track and it worked fine.

I did a lot of other related testing too and closed this bug:
https://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2708

Peter.

13

Cut the track in two, applied the effects to both, then stitch back together again, and it worked fine though! :smiley:

14

Great, thanks for that! I’m on 3.0.2 now and all is fine :slight_smile: