Problem is intermittent at times. while recording music from old cassettes the audio display suddenly locks up and the timer at the bottom of the screen continues. I then have a gap in the music that has been recorded and the two timers don’t agree on the time. When I check the music at the end of the session there are gaps where the audio locked up and then restarted. Sometimes the program has locked up and has to be restarted. I have the same problem but not as often with the old beta audacity program.
How are you recording? How is the cassette player connected to the computer?
Which version of Windows?
Do you have plenty of free disk space (how much, and what is the total drive size?)
What exactly do you mean by “the audio display suddenly locks up”?
I am using windows xp-pro storing files on second hard drive with 480gb free. audacity is installed on first hard drive with 180gb free. I have 4gb ram. I am using a Sony Walkman cassette player to sound card to line in. Sometimes I can record a whole cassette with no problems. When record button is pressed audio display at the top of screen begins to move from left to right displaying audio intensity and counting seconds. Audio position display at bottom of the screen counts along with the top display agreeing in seconds. Problem occurs intermittantly when audio display stops while the audio position display continues to count. I lose any music being played while the audio display is stopped. It stops for a period of 10 to as many as 60 seconds. The sound continues to be audible from the speakers but no indication of recording on the screen.
i thought that version 2.0 might solve my problem but it was worse than the beat 1.3 version I had been using.
More often stops.
HELP Thanks
I appreciate these are not small skips, but something seems to be seriously interfering with Audacity capturing the recording and writing it to disk (the write happens every six seconds or so usually).
Can you try some of the ideas here:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_recording_troubleshooting.html#skips ?
In particular, where is your Audacity temporary directory (see Edit > Preferences: Directories) ?
Gale
Until an Audacity project has been saved, audio data is written to a temp folder. The location of the temp folder is set in “Edit > Preferences > Directories”.
Once the project has been saved, temporary data is written to the project _data folder, which will be wherever you save the project.
Recording to USB external drives can be problematic due to access time/availability, though there should be no problem with a second internal drive (ensure that DMA is enabled) or external firewire or SCSI drives.
4GB is very little space for recording a whole album. Typically an album will require around 1.4 GB, not including any “Undo” history or temporary space required when exporting. On Windows, drives should always have at least 10% free space (at all times) to allow for Windows management.
The problem could be a data bottleneck in writing to disk. If your second drive is an internal drive, try setting the Audacity temp directory to use the second drive. Also, if possible, try and make a bit more space on the primary drive. Keep both drives defragmented. Fragmentation tends to occur more rapidly when the drive is short of space and if the drive has very little space it can cause disk access to grind to a stop.
Audacity 2.x needs to access the hard drive a little more than old 1.3.x versions in order to provide better crash recovery. There’s not much difference, but if the computer is struggling it could be just enough to make a noticeable difference.
Also, see the link that Gale provided.