Twice in the last 5 times I have recorded hour long presentations there were tens of minutes of silence at the beginning of the recording. The recording is done via a USB input to a laptop running Win8.1 with the latest patches. Audacity is 2.0.3. I start recording a few minutes before a presentation and stop it a few minutes after. I do not change anything during the recording. At the beginning of the recording I always verify Audacity is recording.
The problem occurs at the end of the recorded presentation when I click on Save Project As… My usual process is to create a new folder with the date in the name. I then save the project in this folder with the date and name of the presentation in the file name. Until recently this was never a problem. Twice recently I get an error message that “Audacity does not have permission to write into the folder or that there is not enough space”. Audacity does have write permission as it just created the folder. There is 170+ GB of free space on the disk.
At this point I check the recording and surprise: the first tens of minutes (45 minutes the first time and 25 minutes the second time) are silence! At this point I save save the project as a compressed file but this does not restore the missing minutes. Audacity just saves the minutes of silence at the beginning of the file.
I have tried various saves, copy/past to a new file, etc. to recover the missing minutes. I have used Task Manager to cancel Audacity with the hope that the Audacity Recovery will restore the missing minutes. Nothing was successful in restoring the recording.
I have looked at the FAQ for help. There is an FAQ which discusses a recent fix in 2.0.3 that saves silence if a block is overlong. Huh? Why should a block be overlong? My problem is not one block but 10s of minutes of silence. Maybe did this change did not precipitate my problem but it sure seems coincidental. And I do not get any messages that there have been overlong blocks.
HELP!
- How can I recover the missing recording when this happens?
- I believe the recent change to Audacity has an unintended side effect. Or if Audacity is saving silence by design then this is not a good design. There must be a recovery tool/process provided. It is not acceptable that I lose 25 to 50% of a recording with no obvious way to recover it!!!
Steve