I have been using Audacity 1.3.14 beta for several months now with great success. This morning it stumped me by dropping the first 11mins of a live recording.
I was recording a feed from a big mixing desk into the input of my laptop, which I have done successfully on a number of occasions. I was watching the tracks recording, when at 10.54 both tracks ‘flatlined’ - that is to say I lost everything recorded to this point - the left-hand two-thirds of the screen went from healthy amplitude wave form to flatline (time of death 10.54) - and the software carried on and recorded the last 20mins of the event without hitch. That is until I tried to save the project, and was told that there was no space left (rubbish). I was able to export as MP3, but not save the project.
I was recording stereo at 32000Hz
Can anyone shed light on what happened, and how I stop it happening again? - Just for the record, I didn’t touch anything, all this just happened right in front of me.
Very strange,.
Was this the only Audacity Project open at the time?
Did you start the project from freshly launching Audacity straight into the recording, or had you been working on other things in Audacity before you started the recording?
How much free disk space on your C: drive?
Was the project a single stereo track recording?
32 kHz is an unusual sample rate - any reason for that?
You asked…
Was this the only Audacity Project open at the time? Yes
Did you start the project from freshly launching Audacity straight into the recording, or had you been working on other things in Audacity before you started the recording? Yes, it was a live event - started Audacity - Pause, Record, set input levels (from sound desk), pressed pause again to start recording
How much free disk space on your C: drive? 445Gb
Was the project a single stereo track recording? Single stereo track from a stereo jack in the laptops mic socket - it has always worked in the past…
32 kHz is an unusual sample rate - any reason for that? The track was speech - I was trying to reduce the final file size, so I could put it on the Internet for download.
We’ve covered all of the obvious stuff that I can think of and I don’t see any reason why this should occur.
It may be worth running a disk scan to check that your hard disk is all ok and no bad bits on it.
To run Chkdsk on modern versions of Windows you will probably need to run it as Admin and tell it to run on reboot - probably best to run it overnight as it will be very slow.
If you know exactly what kind of hard drive your C: drive is, most hard drive manufacturers have diagnostic disks that can check disks more thoroughly than Chkdsk, (often available from their web site) but they must only be used on drives that they are designed for. These manufacturers programs are often capable of totally wiping the disk and / or making it unreadable, so if you’re not very computer confident you’d be better to stick with Chkdsk.
This would suggest that Audacity could no longer read (some of) the temporary files in C:UsersNeilAppDataLocalTempaudacity_temp .
Did the exported MP3 have the same silence at the start of the track? Did you also export the MP3 to your C: drive?
If the project is still open, please upload the “autosave” file in C:UsersNeilAppDataRoamingAudacityAutoSave plus the log which you can find at Help > Show Log… (click Log > Save… to save the log). You can upload underneath where you post replies.
This may be an Audacity bug or it may be you have a problem with the drive. You could try right-clicking over the drive > Properties then try the error-checking tools. Also check the drive is defragmented.