Hi,
I’m not so newbie audacity the reason and special use I made of it should be a tremendous amount of text wich is not my herein purpose.
Let’s describe the audio “backrgound” process. (recording are form Zoom H4N pro in 24B 44.1KHz)
I have 3 audio tracks, 2 mono, 1 stereo + (each track are fusionned 2:15 hrs records from 6-10 hrs)
1 “timestamped” label track (using the real-time script)
2x3 “Nyquist analyze sound finder” labeled tracks.
When I go to page setup, I choose Landscape A3. Now I’m going to print “all” pages and it works OK
Adding 2 duplicated mono tracks for displaying them as “spectrogram”
Then I go to “file” “print” then it hangs with a “Abort / Retry / Ignore” windows. Sometime “Ignore” works and I can obtain a beautyfull PDF thru PDF Creator printer. Sometime It just F#CK UP the whole project file, brutally exiting and screwing a 4 or 6H file project works. Opening it in “recovery” with just 0dB sound.
So now is the question : Is there some limitation on the “spectrogram” windows that audacity can print ?(eg amount of pixel width or heigh it can export to the printing process) ?
Seems that this problem happen on records over 7H (using the default tracks heigh for a 8 3840Hz spectrogramm view)
thanks for the print to file idea, I’ll give this a try.
I always do HD save of my project. the damn thing is that when it crash, it also kill the project datas on hd.
so now, before printing, I do a zip backup of the whole (.aup and directory) assuming they are 17-28 GB zipped files … suppressing the killed one and restoring the zipped.
this take a while and it’s really losing my time and mind.
the reason why I’m searching for software limitation, in order to limitate my project, just to be sure it will work stable.
I’m not able to reproduce the problem, though I don’t have any projects as complex as the one that you are having problems with.
Could you make a ZIP package containing the full project (the AUP file and it’s _data folder) and upload it to dropbox so that we can test with that project.
Hi Steve, thank for your support.
Don’t think it’s a good idea the zip is about 24 GB (9:30:00 recording) and contain “personnal datas” (I don’t know what my local law says about that, should be something like “You won’t do that” as it’s private).
Still tinkering to find a solution I’ve tried this :
Create a new projetc with 5 min noise sound.
Create a “toto” label track with random labels.
Duplicate the sound track.
here, printing to PDF creator with default settings works a charm.
Now displaying duplicate track as spectrogram.
Here printing starts but generate the “abord/retry/ignore” unhandled exception and hang the project file.
So I can conclude it’s the spectrogram view in cause.
the fact is that it worked at least one time. (and it was so great yeah !)
Print size doesn’t matter,
Seems this topic should be renamed “Using menu : “file” “print”, works or kill, depending on spectrogram view”
Basically, I’m thinking about something like “spectrogram view” being re-processed for the print quality, compared to displayed one. I was wondering that printed spectrogram DPI adapt to page witdh and Track lengh … then someting go wrongs when processing it.
Just my opinion, based on “feelings”.
Do you think that you might be able to produce a small test project that can reliably reproduce the problem? I’ve tried several prints, including spectrograms, but I’ve not been able to reproduce the problem.
Audacity does not include it’s own pdf printer driver, it uses whatever printer driver is available on the host system. In the case of my Linux machine, there’s just the one default version, which has very few options, but as you see from my previous post it works reasonably well.
I’ve just tested, and unfortunately the one provided by Windows 10 is rubbish (imho). It appears to be very buggy; doesn’t retain it’s settings, it scales incorrectly, and fonts are printed extremely small.
The best I was able to achieve on Windows 10 was to go via a .png screen grab image. I’m writing this from memory, so apologies if it’s not exactly right.
Save a screen capture as an image (.png file). I used the free Gimp program, but you could probably just use Audacity’s built in “Screenshot” tool: Screenshot - Audacity Manual
Right click on the saved picture and select “print photo” (perhaps “print picture”?)
Select “Microsoft PDF printer” as the printer, and enable the options to scale the image to fit A3 portrait.
I tried CutePDF Writer (it’s free and I use it a lot) with Windows 10 and Audacity 2.3.2. I used a 54 minute generated “chirp”. I used Audacity’s File menu’’s Print and chose CutePDF Writer as the “printer”; the free version only does portrait from its default “to printer” driver but gives access to the system printing dialog which gives you full control. Before I tried to print I rotated the page so it would look better in landscape mode.
I have some ideas to check. It seem that if the track is over a certain duration, and maybe added by the spectrogram view parameter, while printing, it try to adapt (or redraw) the spectrogram render to some “printing resolution”. Depending on paper size, added of recording time, and this inner resolution, the spectrogram view can become a tremendous amount of pixel width and heigh.
The error looks like an “hunandled exception”, this is something that make me say it goes over some register capacities.
I’ve tried “screenshot” tools, unfortunately it cannot deliver sufficient resolution for my purpose (should be nice on a 5K display screen )
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