Our community radio station does live broadcasts from local music festivals. We get a feed from the sound mixer and stream the audio to the station for rebroadcast. I’m wanting to use Audacity to record the shows, too, and have run into a bit of a hitch: after a long set of music, say, an hour and a half, when I stop the recording, Audacity seemingly freezes. After a while – I have to wait a couple minutes, it becomes responsive and I can finally do a Save of the recording.
It’s a bit unnerving, can’t tell whether Audacity is broken or not, and whether the recording was lost. And that long pause is awkward if the next act starts playing right away (two stages, no more than moments between acts) and we are not yet ready to record the new act.
What’s going on there? Is it writing temporary files?
Is there some preference I can change to auto-save as it records? Or at least pop up a progress bar while it’s doing housekeeping, so we can tell it’s not frozen?
Someone will correct me, but I believe you can get around that delay by saving the show before you record it. That will create a show structure and save the music there instead of the cache system. Then save again when you get done and that should be much faster.
Also note that if you make a delayed Timer Recording if you save the empty project before you start setting up the Timer Record than at the scheduled end of the recording Audacity will automatically save the project for you.
Saving the project before you start recording can minimise the time it takes to save the project at the end, but note that the “save” location must be a reasonably fast local hard drive - don’t attempt this with a network drive.
For a new unsaved project, the recorded audio is written to Audacity’s “temp” folder (set in “Edit > Preferences > Directories”). When you then save the project, the data must be copied from the temp folder to the “_data” folder of the saved project.
For a project that has already been saved, there is already a “_data” folder. All projects have two parts: a “.AUP” file and an associated “_data” folder. The “_data” folder contains the audio data, and the “.AUP” file tells Audacity how the data fits together to make the project. When you record into a project that has already been saved, the audio data is written directly into the project “_data” folder. When you save the project at the end, there is no need for Audacity to move data from the temp folder to the _data folder because it is already in the _data folder. All that Audacity needs to do is to write the updated .AUP file and a bit of housekeeping.
