Import file size too big? Audacity closes before imported

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Windows 10, 20gb free on main drive, 8gb RAM. File is 44kpbs, 1gb, about 24 hours long.

It predicts taking 20 minutes to import, which is more than 2x what it takes to import a 192kbps, 1gb, 12 hour long file. But then crashes about 70% of the way through. Any ideas why?

2

Audacity doesn’t make a very good surveillance recorder.

You’re not just importing a sound file. Audacity decodes, decompresses and then opens up the show in its own higher quality than normal sound format. It uses 32-floating format, not straight 16-bit.

So a 24-hour sound file would be monstrous and overwhelm memory, drive buffer sizes or both.

Koz

3

It could be due to a bit of corrupt or unreadable data 70% of the way through the file.
Are you reading the file off a flash card / thumb drive?
Does the file play all the way through, or does playback stop 70% of the way through?

4

Thanks for the responses. I looked into other options and found MP3DirectCut a lot easier to use for big files–no import times at all. I’ll use that to cut the files down to smaller ones and then process in Audacity.

5

That’s a good approach. MP3DirectCut doesn’t need to do any complex processing, so it is able to act directly on the file without decoding it - that’s why it is so fast.

I’d also suggest that if your recording is on a flash drive / thumb drive, that you copy it to your computer’s hard disk before working on it. This can improve the reliability of data read operations.

6

MP3DirectCut doesn’t need to do any complex processing

The down side of that is you can’t do anything to the sound while it’s inside the software. All you can do is cut and paste. There are no production tools. If that’s your goal, then MP3DirectCut is for you.

Koz