weird playback

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Zappa
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weird playback

Post by Zappa » Fri Feb 19, 2010 3:58 am

Hi, I am new to this, so please bear with me. I had a look, but couldn't see the same problem posted.
I have recorded a few things on Audacity, but when I play them back it Plays back too quickly, in annoying little skips, like when you hold your finger on the fast-forward button on a CD player.
Can anyone help?

Zappa
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Re: weird playback

Post by Zappa » Fri Feb 19, 2010 12:10 pm

Looking at it again this morning, it seems I was wrong about it playing back at the wrong speed. It is however skipping continuously,like fast forwarding through a CD, only more subtle.
This is driving me nuts, Please help!

kozikowski
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Re: weird playback

Post by kozikowski » Fri Feb 19, 2010 3:46 pm

Audacty will not work into a full or badly fragmented hard drive. How much room do you have and have you ever defragmented?

Defrag
-- Right Click Start > Explore > Right Click Local Drive C: > Properties (Used, Remaining) > Tools > Error Checking & Defragmentation

Koz

Zappa
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Re: weird playback

Post by Zappa » Sat Feb 20, 2010 1:16 am

Thanks. My laptop hard drive has 8.8 Gb left out of 37Gb. It did need defragmenting, so i am doing it now.
I have an external 500 Gb hard drive which has 440 Gb unused. Do you think I should run Audacity from that instead?

kozikowski
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Re: weird playback

Post by kozikowski » Sat Feb 20, 2010 1:44 am

Unless it's a FireWire drive, you may run into timing problems trying to split the show and Audacity. Use the external drive to park some of the stuff from your system drive so that one has more room.

Fragmentation will kill Audacity because of the way it works. It always uses external sound files unless you change it in Preferences, so it's really important that the drive be very fast and accurate.

You can change Audacity to [X] Always copy files (Safer). That may help a little, but the system drive still has to be very clear and orderly to pull off complex production.

Koz

waxcylinder
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Re: weird playback

Post by waxcylinder » Sat Feb 20, 2010 12:08 pm

I would not use an external disk (probably not even a firewire one) to run Audacity.

Rather do the capture and editing on your on-board hard drive - and then do your exports of WAV, MP3 whatever to the external drive.

Oh, and do yourself a favour and buy a second 500gb drive so that you can keep two copies of the WAVs, MPs whatever - one copy of data is never enough. If that disk of yours fails then you would lose a lot of work ... (Really cautious people maintain, in addition, a "grandfather" copy off-site in a secure place.)

And I would still free up some more space on your hard drive as Koz suggests - give yourself (and your operating system) a bit more headroom.

WC
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kozikowski
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Re: weird playback

Post by kozikowski » Sat Feb 20, 2010 11:22 pm

The first time someone tries to manage audio (or video) they find out all the warts and blemishes of their machine.

Live audio doesn't wait -- either record or play back. When you press the B-Flat key on your Yamaha keyboard, Audacity must be able to immediately find perfect, high quality, fast space on the hard drive to put it. It can't start digging through the drive management to find where all the little, itsy-bitsy, unused fragmented locations are. They could be sprayed all over the drive and there's your musical note in the dust bin.

Playback of a complex show is similar. Each musical clip in your show must be in one place on the drive, not sprayed all over the drive in fragments. If you're on a PC, you can look at the drive light on the front of your computer. If you play the show and the drive light never goes off, then you got problems.

During capture, the drive light should flicker periodically as Audacity places a segment of show. If that light comes on a lot, then you need housekeeping.

Koz

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