I’ve made some long recordings, some over 24 hours. These are broken into 2GB wav files by the recorder, about 2:15 hours each.
To manipulate them, I have to open them one by one in Audacity, then save them as projects. This is taking several minutes each. Is there a way to automate that?
I was originally going to try to join them into a couple of large projects. I’d prefer one, but there’s the 2^31 sample limit to worry about. I read that this limit might be removed in 2.0.6 (http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/File_Management_Tips). Does anyone have a rough idea of when that might be released?
Even when I stay under that limit, it seems to struggle with the amount of data. For example, I tried to add a label track, and it churned away for a long time then crashed. Is it best to stick with one project per 2GB file?
The limit is per track. So you could import the WAV’s into a single project. Each WAV will be in its own track. Assuming the tracks are 44100 Hz, then you could join the tracks end to end up to a maximum of 13.5 hours per track. Or just time shift each track to start after the previous one, in which case there is no problem.
Sometime early this year, we hope.
It’s known that adding a label or a label track in a long project will cause a delay. You can type the label reasonably fast once the label is created. From that perspective the more total audio in the project, the worse the problem will be.
However you could after closing the project add the label track directly into the AUP file if you know exactly what you are doing. Here is the syntax, showing two point labels at 3.9 and 4.9 seconds. Put the label track after the tag and before the tag.
I was intending using the joining technique you linked to, but had so far only imported several files, and they were still in separate tracks when I noticed that the last one imported would play ok, but its waveform was shown as flat. I thought that meant I’d hit the limit, but perhaps that’s a different bug? I was worried I might lose data.
It’s known that adding a label or a label track in a long project will cause a delay. You can type the label reasonably fast once the label is created. From that perspective the more total audio in the project, the worse the problem will be.
So these delays will occur every time I create a label, even after I’ve created the label track? If so then I have no choice but to put each wav into a separate project. I’ll be adding 100s of labels.
However you could after closing the project add the label track directly into the AUP file if you know exactly what you are doing. Here is the syntax, showing two point labels at 3.9 and 4.9 seconds. Put the label track after the tag and before the tag
So if I have several tracks and want a label track after each one, I should insert them after each /wavetrack tag?
Possibly it’s a bug - how many tracks do you have of what length?
You could also be out of temporary file space (check in Audacity’s Directories Preferences for disk space and check for errors in Help > Show Log… ).
I believe so. Every time you add a label a new autosave file is written for crash recovery purposes. At the moment autosave is very expensive in terms of examining the whole data rather than just writing the change that occurred.
We’ve just removed quite a lot of cases where Audacity would autosave, such as when you click in or draw a selection in the audio track. Perhaps if we can speed up autosaving sometime we can reinstate more autosaves, but I think every label creation should be autosaved.
I’ve got several long projects going at once, so I can’t be sure which one it was, and have deleted the evidence. If it’s the one I think it was then it had 8 tracks. The first 7 were 2:15:15.931 long, and the last one was 0:55:3.874 (44.1kHz stereo). I just tried loading it again the same way, and it didn’t have the problem. Since then I’ve upgraded from (I think) 2.0.1 to 2.0.5, so perhaps that fixed it.
You could also be out of temporary file space (check in Audacity’s Directories Preferences for disk space and check for errors in Help > Show Log… ).
I don’t think I was out of space. There’s still 5GB free after trying to replicate it.
It’s known that adding a label or a label track in a long project will cause a delay. You can type the label reasonably fast once the label is created. From that perspective the more total audio in the project, the worse the problem will be.
Are the label delay problems any different for on demand loading? I’ve found I can at least get the project set up far quicker using that.