Editing a mono track for an audiobook. 10 minutes ago, while copying a small bit of room tone from one spot to “cover” a loud breath noise, it froze. Popup says “not responding”. Still sitting that way as I type this entry.
It was working fine this morning. I stopped for a break, saving my work as always. When I came back to resume, it just stopped working.
I have a decent computer with plenty of RAM and more than enough disk space for buffering if necessary.
How long is the performance and how long have you been editing? When you make an edit no matter how small, Audacity makes a protection copy of the whole show. If you make a mistake and Edit > UNDO, Audacity doesn’t try to unscramble your last edit. It just plays back the show before this one.
That means if you’ve been editing all morning, the machine could be juggling hundreds of copies of the show. Eventually, the machine is going to run out.
There’s another oddity. If you just Save Project and not Save As or Save Backup, you only have one copy of the performance. It’s possible, depending on what broke, you have no copies of the Editing All Morning.
I like Exporting a perfect quality WAV file as a backup, once when I finish announcing, and then every so often, under new names, during the edit and then as the final Edit Master, even though ACX wants my book submitted as MP3. This won’t work if your show is multi track or complicated, but I’ve never lost a paid gig.
Koz
The file I’m working on is one chapter for an audiobook, and is a 12 minute long mono file. It is what I call my MASTER file. The first recording is my RAW file. When I have finished that un-edited file, I save it with a suffix of RAW. Then I Save-As with a suffix of EDIT. The RAW file is my stand-alone backup. I edit the second file with a LOT of copy and paste of room tone to even out the spaces between sentences and paragraphs, and to eliminate loud breaths and other random noises. This sometimes includes (and this is just my peculiar process) opening a second track and re-recording a line with which I am dissatisfied, then copying and pasting it over the line in the first track.
When I am done with the EDIT file and have saved it, I create a copy with the suffix of MASTER. This one gets the adjustments that bring it into compliance with ACX standards. Fortunately, I have a “script” that applies these changes almost instantly and the only thing I do after that is listen through and pick out any artifacts that jump out at me. Once satisfied, I export to MP3 and send it up to ACX.
This process has worked well for me across hundreds of chapters of audiobooks.
One thing occurs to me in this moment. Before this problem started, I had just applied the latest Windows update. Perhaps that is a factor in this.
Is this a bad place to insist you not update anything while you’re producing a show?
Koz
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Well…
Audacity 3.7.4 is fine.
Windows 11 is fine (some might not agree with that…
)
Somehow, my MASTER file glitched at some point in the middle of editing. No idea what or how, but when it first happened it only froze for maybe 20-30 seconds before resuming and I saved the file before continuing. From that point on it got worse, and each time I crashed out while working on it, Audacity would (of course) find that the file had not been saved correctly and load the most recently saved version. The original glitchy version. 
A new MASTER has been created and I’ve moved on.
Sorry for my “Chicken Little” moment.
Let’s mark this one as resolved.
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