I’ve reinstalled Windows 7 Professional SP1 and the current version of Audacity (2.0.5 and even 2.0.4) automatically stops recording after 1-3 minutes. The timeframe seems to be random. By trying different things I found out that the issue is with my USB microphone - Samson Meteor mic (http://www.samsontech.com/samson/products/microphones/usb-microphones/meteormic/), because when I record from an integrated microphone, the recording goes do 10 minutes and beyond. Plugging the USB mic to another USB port didn’t help.
Since the microphone doesn’t have any specific drivers and it used to work before I reinstalled my OS, is there something I can do to narrow the issue down in order to fix it?
One likely possibility is that your USB microphone is temporarily losing its connection. The following measures may help:
Ensure that your USB microphone is plugged directly into the computer and not via a USB hub.
Avoid running other programs at the same time as recording (especially programs that may require a lot of CPU or disk access).
If you have Skype (or other VOIP applications) on your computer, ensure that they are entirely shut down and not running in the background.
If the problem persists, disconnect from the Internet and temporarily shut down your anti-virus software, then try making a recording. If the problem does not occur, then you may need to configure your anti-virus program to ignore Audacity data files (“.au” files) and not to perform a system scan while you are recording.
Of course the mic was plugged into my USB hub. And of course when I connected it right to the USB port in the notebook, I was able to record for 30 minutes without any issues. I put it back to the hub and two times recording got stuck after a few minutes. Back to notebook’s USB and it’s again recording 30 minutes.
So thank you for such a quick response which helped me to fix my issue, Steve!