I record long international radio streams overnight to listen to later in the car.
Lately, Audacity has been giving me garbled data after the 6 hours recording mark. My recordings are usually about 8-9 hours, but for some reason now it’s been getting corrupted after 6 hours.
If the issue occurs at a particular time of day (or night), check to see if your computer has any tasks scheduled to run at that time.
You could also try defragmenting your hard drive (that can take a while, so you will probably want to leave that running overnight).
I’ll take a look. I generally have tasks running at 3AM, and there is nothing going on around 6:30AM when I get up to take a look and it’s still garbled. If I stop the recording and start it again, it’s fine.
I took a look at the temp file storage, everything looks OK. It’s about 10GB of data that is stored.
but many people turn off their computers when not using them, in which case Windows has little time to defragment the disk and the disk contents can become fragmented, which reduces the number of large contiguous spaces, making write access slow down as the drive has to work harder to find empty spaces.
There are no apparent silences in the waveform (where I looked) but it sounds like, repeatedly, some of the digital samples are not getting written.
I think you will probably need to go through everything here Missing features - Audacity Support eliminating possibilities. It could be if you look in Windows Task Manager that you will see some process running at the time in question that is causing the computer to work hard enough that the recording is compromised. Check your DPC latency performance (see the bottom of that Wiki page).
You should also investigate whether updating your sound device drivers would help. You want to have the latest audio drivers for your computer model obtained from the web site of your computer manufacturer or motherboard manufacturer.
Have you tried out Windows WASAPI loopback instead of stereo mix?
There are no apparent silences in the waveform (where I looked) but it sounds like, repeatedly, some of the digital samples are not getting written.
I think you will probably need to go through everything here > Missing features - Audacity Support > eliminating possibilities. It could be if you look in Windows Task Manager that you will see some process running at the time in question that is causing the computer to work hard enough that the recording is compromised. Check your DPC latency performance (see the bottom of that Wiki page).
You should also investigate whether > updating your sound device drivers > would help. You want to have the latest audio drivers for your computer model obtained from the web site of your computer manufacturer or motherboard manufacturer.
Have you tried out Windows WASAPI loopback instead of stereo mix?
Gale
Cool. Thanks for the response.
I checked the DPC latency, and there are no problems.
I’ll take a look at updating drivers.
I have not tried the WASAPI method, and I am Googling to try and figure out how to do that. Any suggestions?
EDIT: I see that WASAPI is just a function of Audacity by default. I will try it out this way and submit what I find on here!
Cool. I actually edited my post since I found the answer Thank you for confirming. I am excited to give this a try and see if it resolves the issue.
I had to install Realtek drivers to get Stereo Mix to show up, but that might cause more problems than it solves. Seems like the default drivers in Windows are pretty fine for me.
So I tried recording using the WASAPI device. All is well! I guess there is some kind of issue with my Stereo Mix. If I knew about WASAPI going in, I would have never even bothered installing my audio driver to enable WASAPI.
Thanks a lot for your help, I honestly wasn’t even familiar with the new method. And after reading about how its Digital → Digital, not Digital - > Analog → Digital, this makes me happy!
In principle you want to have the latest audio drivers for your computer model obtained from the web site of your computer manufacturer (if it’s a branded computer like Dell) or motherboard manufacturer (if you built the computer yourself).
If you installed generic drivers from the Realtek site in order to obtain stereo mix, that may very well be why it doesn’t work properly.
Thank you for confirming. I am excited to give this a try and see if it resolves the issue.