I’ve been recording YouTube videos for 4 months now, with 0 problems using Audacity ever. But for the past 3 days I haven’t been able to record as Audacity keeps randomly crashing mid-recording. It’s not like it even says ‘‘not responding’’ it literally just closes with no warning. When I re-open the software I can recover the files but that’s utterly useless to me as I record live-commentary gaming videos. Please someone let me know what’s happening/why it’s happening/how I can fix it.
Audacity doesn’t record video. It’s an audio editor.
Where do you put the sound files when you get done recording them? You probably shouldn’t leave them on the system drive (C:).
You shouldn’t let Audacity “see” or “touch” a network or cloud drive, but you can close Audacity and move things around in Windows as much as you want.
This is a perfect place for a cloud drive, but again, don’t make Audacity post files in a cloud drive directly. Record and Export the files on C:\ Move files around when Audacity is closed.
When a program crashes in Windows, it can leave trash around the computer and set you up for more crashes. Close Audacity and clean shutdown the machine. Shift+Shutdown > Wait > Start. Not Restart and not regular Shutdown.
Are you filling up your C:\ drive? Windows doesn’t like that very much. How big is the drive and how much room do you have left—in numbers. Is it a solid state drive? Those are well-behaved and very fast, but they don’t much like filling up, either, for different reasons. SSDs need to shuffle files around to stay healthy. If they choke, it’s not pretty.
I didn’t say that Audacity records video. I know it doesn’t. I said I use it TO record videos. As in, it is part of my video. Thought that was incredibly self-explanatory.
I export the files to my HDD, not that this has any relevance as I don’t get to finish my files as the software crashes randomly mid recording. Happened again today after uninstalling and reinstalling off of the website.
I have like 92.5Gb of 225Gb on my C:\ drive.
I’ll try the SHIFT+SHUTDOWN option but if that doesn’t work then yeah, no help received whatsoever.
Also may I add, I was using 2.4.2 when everything was completely fine, then thought that it may be a case of the version being outdated so updated to the most recent (3.0.3 I believe) only to have caused me more issues, for the small time that it does record before crashing, my mic quality is now significantly worse than it was before.
Do you know of any other audio recording software that is free and that has similar features? Hopefully I’ll have no issues on there.
No, not self explanatory. We see lots of people recording audio FROM YouTube videos, and even a few people attempting to record audio + video from YouTube.
It’s clear now.
If Audacity 2.4.2 WAS working, and the Audacity 2.4.2 WAS NOT working, and neither is Audacity 3.0.3, that’s a strong indication that Audacity is a VICTIM in all of this, rather than the CAUSE.
There is an Audacity Discord, but you could grow old waiting for someone to help you there. It’s mostly used for development related discussion rather than end user help.
An easy thing that you could try is resetting Audacity’s configuration (“Tools menu > Reset Configuration”)
I hadn’t messed with any files or anything like that.
You don’t have to mess with any Audacity files. Something in the environment can be causing problems. For one popular example, Skype, Zoom and other conferencing tools take over your machine’s sound services. They don’t just change a setting here and there, they take over and can prevent other sound programs from working. That’s what makes it so darn much fun to record a Zoom call at home.
While Audacity is recording a long performance, it keeps a temporary storage cache system and it uses way more “live” memory than you would think a simple recording should take. Also, it needs complete, perfect, unobstructed access to the hard drive. This is not a good time to be recalculating a large spreadsheet or performing a Photoshop Gaussian Blur.
So that brings us back to Clean Shutdown of Windows. That’s what Shift+Shutdown does. Everybody out of the pool. Don’t save any settings or configurations and don’t restart anything automatically when Windows comes back up.
Obviously if that cures the problem, then we know there was a conflict and you can work from there. Also note if the problem changes. Any change is valuable to know.
We run into forum poster problems when a message from someone with good working knowledge of the computer takes semantic shortcuts and produces an identical message to a Clueless User.
No, not self explanatory. We see lots of people recording audio FROM YouTube videos, and even a few people attempting to record audio + video from YouTube.