Is there a way to import a 14hr sound file of raw data in less than 45min or an hour??? I imported three files within the passed three days and it took me slightly less than an hour to import it and another hour to convert the file to an mp3. Is there a way to import it and convert it quicker, like in a 15 minute span of time???
You need a larger machine. Importing a large “music” file rapidly requires enormous fast memory. I’m going with a guess of 64GB of memory, and that’s just the import. If you don’t do that, the machine will go as far as it can and then start swapping the work to hard drive. That’s what’s taking all the time. If you insist on doing a lot of other work while the show is importing, then that will slow it down, too.
Isn’t this where you ask us to provide a time stamp for your surveillance?
Koz
Get a faster computer?
You’ve not said what format the files are in, but assuming 128 kbps MP3, you are wanting to decode around 840 MB of data to around 8.5 GB uncompressed.
[update: my mistake - you did say “raw data” - but what is that? PCM? Mono/Stereo? Sample rate? Bit depth? Whatever the format it’s a lot of data]
The computer not only needs to decode the data, but needs to write it to disk and calculate the waveform to be displayed. That is a lot of data to shift around and a lot of number crunching.
Also note that Audacity projects currently have a limit of 2^31 samples.
From the release notes:
Known Issues at Release
Headline issues
Large ProjectsProjects with more than 2^31 samples (just over 13.5 hours at 44100 Hz) will not re-open correctly. Higher sample rates mean proportionally shorter times - so just over 6 hours at 96,000 Hz. We know the cause, and do intend to address this bug. Workaround: Before saving or closing the project, export to audio files of appropriate size, or cut and paste sections of audio containing less than 2^31 samples to new Audacity projects and save those.
My laptop is an A8 radeon amd quadecore with 8gig’s of ram (Expandable to 16gigs.) I guess I’ll need a quad core phenom with 16gigs of ram to import 14 hours of raw data (Ex. file.tmp) in less than 45 minutes. Sometimes when my recorder crashes by accident with no fault of its own when I don’t zoom out correctly (It only recognizes a certain timeline before it crashes,) I have to put the tmp file in audacity to import the raw data, and then convert it to an mp3 for editing.
convert it to an mp3 for editing.
Which you shouldn’t be doing, either. MP3 adds musical damage every time you make a new one and you have to make a new one when you get done editing. For best results you should be editing in WAV, AIFF or other uncompressed music format – which you will not be able to do with that size of show.
Your job definition has pretty much limited you to doing it the way you’re doing it.
Audacity is not a surveillance recorder and it doesn’t handle very long shows gracefully. Many times it isn’t Audacity’s fault. PCs have limitations.
What’s the show? Recording BBC Radio 1 for hours?
Koz
Nah, I usually record online streaming club music. I usually split it into different sections in case something messes up, which is only 3 out of 20 times. I was able to get it to load within 15 with the version of Linux I use, but, unfortunately the sound chip in my laptop isn’t compatible with it. I couldn’t do enhancements or even a speed change. I I’ll have to upgrade the version of Linux I’m using to the most recent version even though I won’t have certain programs in it.
If you record it as an uncompressed file type (compete with file header) then you could use the “Read uncompressed audio files directly from the original (faster)” import option. Audacity Manual