Need help figuring out the pattern here.
My audacity seem to be crashing every 3rd or 4th time I use it.
It most crashes when I go to close the program after saving, sometimes crashing as it is compressing the files. Sometime just in closing without any sign of compressing.
Sometimes, like today, it crashed when making a click to select a segment. Autosave didn’t seem to work, and it instead gives me a corrupted file (sometimes).
I’ve gotten really good at using the recovery program.
I’ve tried keeping file sizes down, but it still seems to randomly crash with files smaller then 5,000,000 KB. No luck.
It’s not memory or disk. I’ve actively watched them.
It would be good to know which Audacity you’re using. Is it possible this started happening at the last Audacity update? Would it happen to be 3.7.x?
Since you’re on Windows you should clear your Audacity work, close Audacity, and do a Clean Windows Shutdown.
I can’t find a good simple how-to, but it’s basically Ctrl-Alt-Del and then hold the Shift key while the machine shuts down. There are ways to force Windows to do that every time, but I don’t think that’s needed.
When Windows does a Restart or Regular Shutdown, it can leave trash behind. Your computer may be fighting this trash. A Clean Shutdown will take longer which is why Microsoft doesn’t make you do it every time. But it is more thorough.
As a side issue, make sure Audacity is the only thing running while you’re doing production.
Audacity should be restricted to work on your local drive. No External Drives, Home Network, Internet, Cloud or any other non-internal drives. The sole exception is the audio.com cloud drives and then only if you’re using the 3.6.x Audacity versions or later.
Appreciate it!
And yeah. Was hoping to see if others are having similar experiences.
I am currently on 3.7.4 - But the problem has plagued me for an embarassingly long time. Maybe it got worse with the latest update, but hard to say. I’ve been using Audacity seriously since 2022.
I’ll give the clean windows shutdown thing a shot.
Question to one thing you mentioned. What is the issue with using it off an external drive? Because Audacity files are so huge, it’s become one of the best ways for us to hand of data during projects.
Audacity works best on internal drives. The more external your drives are, the more likely they are to cause problems.
Direct connect USB, Lightning, or Firewire Drives should work OK, but Do Not go through a hub or multi-drive interface. There is no drive sharing.
Next is home network drives. This is the first place that network protocols can cause problems. If someone else in the house needs to connect at the exact same time that you’re trying to save an edit, one of you has to stop and wait.
By far the worst is cloud services. Not only do they have to observe network protocols (Routing Management, Collision Detection, Error Processing, Retry Management), but they also have delay. The trip to and from the server building in Schenectady is not instant.
That was the story up until the Audacity cloud drives from Audio.com.
These services are married to your local Audacity and everybody knows what’s going on. That’s not a license to use anybody else’s cloud drives. You are urged to try this service on a non-critical show before you commit.
I don’t use that service, but from fuzzy memory, you get some free storage and if you exceed that, it starts costing money. Something else to check before you commit.
Interesting.
And thank you. You filled some holes in what I was understanding googling around.
My set up is a direct USB hard drive with the Audacity files located on it. follow this, I’m gonna try moving my working Audacity files onto the local drives while working and see if that was my main problem.
Semi random question jump : what in your experience is the biggest file size Audacity can handle. Sometime I have 11GB files running as smooth as butter, and others I have 2GB files that crash on saving.
Ever defragment your hard drive? Are you giving me funny looks right now?
Ideally, your drive would save all your work as intact files and park them one after the other, carefully recording their locations.
However,
As the drive fills up, that stops working, so the machine rips the files into pieces and stores the pieces wherever it can find room. As this juggling act gets worse and worse, your computer slows down and it may even cause some data damage.
Here is a good explanation of the process.
This is not fast and if your drive is filling up, or you haven’t done it in a while, it may take a very long time.
Don’t start defrag if you’re going to need the machine in the next hour or so.
Do the work on the local drive, save or export and then close Audacity. Now you can push the files around wherever you want. Move the files back to the local drive and then start Audacity. My silly joke is you can put the files wherever you want, you just can’t let Audacity see you doing it.
Taking an Audiobook job as an example, read and edit a chapter at a time on the internal drive. You don’t have to put the whole 300 page book on the local drive.
What kind of show takes 11GB? 4GB is 6 hours of perfect quality stereo WAV (Microsoft) content.
When shows get that big it’s good to remember that Audacity makes a separate copy of the show each time you edit or make a change. How many edits have you done? Multiply times 11GB… … ..
Huh interesting.
Back after another day of editing with only one crash to report after moving to local and doing the shift shutdown. It didn’t corrupt any files, but was still annoying.
I’m working on a pretty straight forward podcast with 4 voice tracks (all mono), and usually 1 or 2 lines of sparse sound effects. Occasional music. But yeah. 4 feeds for a 1 hour episode would add up pretty quick.
Edits wise, that might be where it’s getting me. There tends to be quite a lot of little cuts here, or leveling tweeks there. Been having my suspicions about this.
Since last week, one of my go to strats has become to copy or render out the individual lines of sound, and then put them into a fresh Audacity file to get around the ‘seperate file copies per edit’
Quick note there. Audacity doesn’t try to take apart the last edit if you make a mistake and perform Edit > Undo. It plays back The Whole Show before the edit. So it’s 11GB every time you change something.
I understand the 4.x.x versions of Audacity have tried to work around this because everybody agrees how dangerous this is, but under most conditions it still does this.
Any way you can produce the show in pieces?
The WVFRM Podcast goes over an hour most times and produces the show in Scenes or Chapters with breaks.
By my count, they have four microphones and insert effects sounds as needed. The Host has one, the two Performers have one each and the Producer (on the right) and the Production Manager share one.
There’s a story about that, Someone posted on the forum about Audacity not recovering from a crash. We went into the analysis with the idea that this was an unfortunate one-off.
Turns out later that the poster’s Audacity crashed constantly and this was the first time it didn’t recover.
