Just started using Audacity 2.3.2 this week, with windows 10 on pc.
Seemed to be going well first day or 2, but now it is crashing fairly consistently. It offers to recover projects upon opening but saying ‘yes’ to this only crashes and closes the program.
The only way to proceed seems to be to allow it to discard all ‘unrecoverable’ projects (ie: all of them) and start again.
Have tried this, however, and same thing happens.
Have reinstalled with no change. Urgent project due in 5 days so bit stressful. Help would be much appreciated.
Can you do this on a different machine? Multiple crashes indicate to me starting inspections as to why and that could take a while.
Audio (and video) is stressful for a computer and if it’s not at the top of its game some really nasty things can happen.
As a first swipe, Clean start. Shift-Shutdown, wait a bit and Start, Not regular Shutdown and not Restart. This one cleans out more settings and environment trash (and takes longer).
Are you trying to do work on a cloud drive? That can cause problems. Audacity doesn’t like that very much. Can you work with the network shut down or disconnected?
Do you have enough room on your drives? Audacity takes a lot of elbow room while it’s working. How long is the show? Audacity saves the show in special uncompressed format that’s larger than you think and in the course of production, does it multiple times. Do you use MP3s or other compressed files in your work? Those are misleading because they balloon up to may times their apparent size when in use.
As a cousin to that, have you ever defragented your drive? If it’s a mechanical drive (not a solid state drive) they get slower with use. Audacity demands perfect, real-time response.
Can you temporarily turn off your virus software? You should be disconnected from the network to do that.
The real problem with finding what looks like the failure is proving it by editing a “fake” show and see if it crashes. By the time you prove your machine worthy, it may be too late. That loops back to doing this show on another machine.
Hmmn yeah. Lots to try there.
Unfortunately no other machine available to me at this time.
Its just a 30min audio mixtape so not too complex a project, although bringing in a lot of small sound clips so very multi-tracked.
I can and have been editing off-line, but doesn’t seem to make a difference to the crashes. No cloud-drive involved, only local files. Think only mp4 and float files but will check.
Have 100gb free so im thinking that would be room enough to work?
Im not sure about the defragging. Im behind on tech so have some catching up to do on regular protocols to keep it all running smoothly. Will look it up, cheers.
Do you think a different software may have better luck? Ive just spent days learning audacity shortcuts so I’d prefer not, but really want to get this done.
Or an older version?
I’ve had this problem with Audacity Portable, as well as Audacity 2.32…
The program will crash, but when asked to recover files, they come up empty. I sometimes get a “Inconsistencies were found” error also. In most cases it’s no big deal, but when I’ve been working on a file for a couple hours only for it to crash, it gets a little frustrating.
You should be really precise when you post on the forum. There is no Audacity 2.32. You can get Audacity 2.3.2 from here.
Audacity 2.23 may be designed and built by somebody else—and you’re on your own for support. That and I don’t think Portable is made by us. I can be corrected there.
Do you think an earlier version woild avoid this problem?
I think you can try it and find out. Older Audacity Windows versions are available.
Think only mp4 and float files
Float files? MP4 files are video files with a sound track and Audacity, most times, just strips off the sound and edits that. But it has to manage everything. So four tiny songs may mean Audacity has to manage four videos. Four uncompressed videos. Your problem just screams running out of room or resources for a large job.
Try this. Open each MP4 song by itself and export the music as WAV Microsoft 16-bit. Close Audacity when you get them all and reopen it with just those WAV songs. That should strip off all the video craziness. Pay attention not only if it starts working, but if it changes good or bad. Do Not use MP3 for this. MP3 has its own production problems.