Audacity suddenly loses volume

I’ve used Audacity many times in studio to record a 3 hour radio show.
After saving the recording to a compact flash card I was attempting to
edit the show and saw that the audio dropped dramatically. (see waveform pic)
I never touch Audacity while recording. If fact, it’s on a computer not visible.
I’m using Audacity 2.0.1 on a Windows 7 operating system.
Any help??
ScreenShot001.jpg

What does that mean?

It means I’m not able to view the computer screen while it is recording

What are those sharp spikes on the bottom track? What do they sound like?

You don’t fall into any of the regular Windows problems. Does it sound like you’re suddenly recording way off-mike?

If I had to guess at it, I’d say your USB microphone became unplugged and the system defaulted to the built-in microphone for that duration. I would expect Audacity to crash when that happened, but that’s the only thing that makes sense.

Koz

You should start watching the Audacity Red Record Meters during the performance. You are “flying blind” without that. I would further say you could get a damaged recording, but that’s redundant.

You can grab the right-hand edge of the meters and pull them to the right to make them bigger and easier to see.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_record.jpg

Koz

Thanks for all your thoughts.
The engineer at the radio station now says that this is NOT a problem with Audacity.