Hi everyone,
I haven’t posted here for a while because Audacity is working great!
However, I have a problem at the moment I can’t seem to solve:
as I’m using Audacity 2.0.3 on AV linux on a USB stick (live boot), when I opened Audacity it told me I had very little space left for recording. So I selected a separate directory, which is a SD card. But it doesn’t seem to recognize it, and now it won’t open. What must I do? I don’t have a hard disk in this pc, I use just the USB live distro, and the SD card for file saving.
You can reset the default temp directory (and all other preferences) by deleting the preference file:
/home//.audacity-data/audacity.cfg
Hopefully Audacity will at least now start.
Probably the best location for the temporary data would be on the internal hard drive, if you have read/write access to that.
Hi Steve,
thanks for the tip. I’ll try deleting the file and see if that allows it to open. If not, I’ll just do a reinstall.
As the pc in question doesn’t have a HDD in it, I wanted to try booting from a live USB, and AVlinux is a good distro to use this way. I think the solution in this case is to use a USB stick that’s at least 6GB in size. The minimum size required is 4GB, which is what I used. But apparently 4GB doesn’t allow enough space for recording to a temp directory (I only have about 200 seconds of time to record!) Of course, I export the final works to the SD card just fine, but 200 seconds is a bit tight…
Reinstalling is unlikely to make any difference. Removing the audacity.cfg file is the important thing. The audacity.cfg file is not replaced by re-installing.
The default audio format is 32 bit float, which requires about 2 MB per minute for stereo tracks (1 MB per minute for mono). To be able to export you need enough free space to accommodate both temporary files and the exported file. If you do any editing or processing, the amount of space increases rapidly because Audacity keeps an “Undo History” of nearly everything until you close the project.
If you are only wanting to record and not edit, you may be better to use a more simple program for recording (such as the command line “arecord”
A typical example for a simple set-up might be something like:
arecord -f cd -d 20 myrecording.wav
This tells arecord to record in CD format (-f cd) for 20 seconds (-d 20) to file “myrecording.wav” (in the current directory).
Thanks Steve. I deleted the config file and indeed it opened just fine.
I need Audacity for recording and editing both, making multiple tracks, etc, so arecord isn’t a very good option, even though I have used it before and it certainly has its purposes.
My problem is that the distro at hand takes up almost the entire 4GB, leaving the USB stick so full that I can’t do any recording with Audacity… I should have used a slightly larger stick.
So I either need to change sticks or distro!
Anyway, thanks much… I love Audacity, I don’t use a DAW for recording at all, just Audacity, it works great.
All my recordings for linux (in particular for software synthesizers for linux) you can find on my website, if you’re curious or wanting to link to examples using Audacity:
