We record a podcast where everyone uses Audacity locally and we talk over a Hangouts call. On the session I’m editing, one person has a few sections where audacity has completely cut out. Everyone else is responding to them so the call was working normally and their hardware wasn’t playing up. After a few seconds the track cuts back in and is in time with everyone else, so it hasn’t dropped time, only audio. There are a few brief snippets in some of the silent sections.
There’s obviously not much we can do about this situation, but can anyone advise on what situations create this problem, so we can try and avoid them in future?
There’s obviously not much we can do about this situation
I don’t know about that. Is it important enough for you to ship the mixed show to that person and let them try to recreate the dialog using the same microphone, environment and computer? I’m betting they remember what they said given the prompting of the other performers.
“This is where I called John a doofus for saying that.”
That is the down aside to individual recordings. One of the individuals crashes.
There’s a way to cheat, too. Set your smartphone recording on the desk in the room with each performance. That’s the emergency backup.
Also double record the co-ord circuit. Either of those is better than zip-zero.
The very posting before yours was from someone complaining about his Windows machine creating bad recordings. I told him if it continued that way, stop using the computer.
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/dropouts-on-all-recordings/53152/1
After about the third or fourth posting where for days we couldn’t figure out what was causing bad computer recordings, I thought about stop hitting myself in the head with a stick. I cranked out a good quality voice file with that recorder straight out of the box.
Koz
I think I can edit it together so we keep the sense of things, it’s just a bit annoying especially as I always have a back-up - usually just recording the call - but for the first time in years I forgot to start it for this session.
I was just wondering whether there were any known causes of this type of problem. I suspect it might be that the Audacity temp folder was on an overly full disk but I guess it could just have been Windows being awful, as it likes to.
Alright, this was actually not Audacity’s fault, or at least it was Audacity’s fault but not in the way I thought.
Re-downloading the original unprocessed audio file, the sound was actually there. It must have been deleted when I ran RMS Normalise or the limiter against it ahead of starting work on it. Annoying, but I haven’t lost anything and was able to patch it all together again nicely.