I have a problem with Audacity recently… It won’t save my project properly… I have been using Audacity to make recordings of lectures since last month without any problems. However, the past week has been quite a bad week for Audacity… It just won’t save any files! I’ve lost 2 recordings due to this… I can make do without those 2 recordings but how can I make sure Audacity saves my files next time? If not I would just try to find a new audio recording software to do this job (somehow Microsoft’s Sound Recorder doesn’t produce files which are of good enough quality)…
The save button is greyed out when I try to press save after stopping the recording… Another thing is that in the most recent recording, Audacity did not ask me to save at all! When I pressed the close project button, the project just closed without any warning… No save dialogue! (After it closed that project Audacity remained “half alive” - the buttons still can be pressed, just that nothing useful is done… Closing the main window also fails… Had to force quit it)
The other recording which I lost was even more bizarre… I could press the Save button, but the save dialogue does not appear… Tried multiple times and a half-rendered “Save as” dialogue came out (no folders were displayed in the browser area)…
Could it be other factors (hard disk failure?)? I always record to RAM first and let it transfer to disk at the end of the lecture…
We are seriously considering deleting “Record to RAM” in the next version of Audacity. It would seem to be ideal; high speed, no latency, etc., etc, but it’s been our experience it can make the machine unstable and frequently causes program failure or damages the show. Not a positive experience. The original reason for its design doesn’t exist any more on computers you’re likely to use.
Do you have room on your hard drive? You have a lot of symptoms of having filled up your drive.
Start > My Computer > Local Drive C: > Properties.
Therefore a 16-bit 44100 Hz recording of two hours duration requires 1.2 GB. If you normalise the whole recording or apply some other effect to the whole recording, you need 2.4 GB. The more editing you do, the more space you need. You can click View > History and discard undo levels to free up space.
If the RAM drive is reliable you can leave the recording where it is, with the Audacity temporary directory set to the RAM drive (subject to space considerations as above).
You can also File > Save Project after recording, saving to the hard drive. This will move the recorded data off the RAM drive.
The user said - he is concerned about battery power. Note the disk writes are made every six to twelve seconds (and the writes to RAM likewise if you use a RAM drive).
I called in the Birthday Money, the Christmas money and Mad Money from the Sock Drawer and got an SSD for my laptop. It’s quiet, very fast, cool and I still have 4-5 hour battery life (it says). It stops acting like a drive and more like a stunningly large expansion of the internal memory.
You can turn off [ ] spin down the hard drive when possible. They’re impervious to mechanical vibration and magnetism. The name brands have life expectancies longer than possibly you do.
i suppose recording to it requires much less power than a spinning HDD?)