Audacity Forum

In a series of posts in September 2008 the problem of Audacity stopping in the middle of recording was briefly discussed but the problem didn’t seem to be resolved, at least no one posted any response confirming success.

Recording with Audacity worked well for me until recent weeks when it just started stopping in the middle of recording, whether it was recording from a CD, streaming from the radio or from a music file being played on the PC. Also, the sound from the media being played dies and neither will work again until I reboot.

Does anyone have the answer to this problem? My operating system is XP Home, there’s about 37Gb free disk space and about 2 Gb memory.

PS Not too familiar in the use of forums

<<<there’s about 37Gb free disk space and about 2 Gb memory.>>>

That's a darn good start. Now run My Computer > C: > Properties > Tools > Error Check and Defragment. Audacity has to do everything in real time and it can't go plowing through a large, but messy hard drive looking for free space. The space has to be contiguous and absolutely error free. The Defrag display can't be covered in red bars.

<<<about 37Gb free disk space >>>

On what? You didn't say that was your C: drive. There are problems with External USB drives for live capture.

How large is the total hard drive? I once had a PC that I put a 750GB drive into as D: and took it right back out again because the machine couldn't manage it fast enough. It brought the machine to its knees.

I rescue a lot of machines by closing stuff. How many other applications do you have running at the same time?

You can get a very vigorous virus protection program to interfere with Audacity. Disconnect the network and turn off the virus protection as a test.

Let us know if any of that worked.

Koz

Thank you for your speedy reply.

I ran an Error Check and Defragment and after restarting the PC switched off my antivirus (Kaspersky) and disconnected from the internet (no othere applications running). Then I opened Audacity and tried to record an mp3 file playing in VLC Media Player. The recording went well for 2.22 minutes of the 2.40 minute song and the recording stopped, the sound stopped and the system became unstable. I closed both applications using Task Manager but when I tried to use VLC Media Player to play the song again there was no sound. I had to restart the computer.

My C: drive is 76.6GB of which 37.6GB is free space. Just tried to record the same piece of music and this time it recorded for about 20 seconds. Losing all hope of finding a solution to this one.

You're still running multiple media packages at the same time. Your hard drive has to play the song in real time, VLC has to run in real time, Audacity has to run in real time and the capture has to write to the hard drive in real time. Too many real times.

Convert the song to something Audacity can read using Super or Switch or the converter of your choice and then open that in Audacity directly.

Koz

I take your point about running multiple packages at the same time but the thing is, I’ve been using Audacity for at least two years without any problem. The fault just seems to have manifested itself recently. It hasn’t been a build-up of fragmentation because I defrag the hard disk fairly frequently.

My use of Audacity to try and record from music on the PC or from a CD has just been to test Audacity since the start of the problem. Normally I would use it to record an old song I’d heard on the radio, so converting the material isn’t an option either as I need to record it in the first instance.

The only change I’ve made to the PC recently, apart from installing Sun’s newest version of Open Office, is to connect a scanner which initializes when the PC boots up. I’ll try disconnecting it to see if it makes any difference.

Thanks again for your help and I let you know how I get on.

How fast is your computer? We never talked about that.

The fuzzy overall view is you are experiencing a backup caused by speed. Again, everything runs at real time. If the drives can't keep up for any reason, the work starts accumulating in much faster hardware memory and eventually fails the first time a packet goes to "storage" and there isn't any. It's the memory bit-bucket filling up waiting for the hard drive to get around to servicing the request.

If it always used to work, you did something to cause this.

Koz

My PC has a AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 2800+ 1.60GHz with 1.96GB of ram.

I tried disconnecting my scanner but it made no difference. I have to agree, I feel I have done something to cause this but just I cannot think what. I will keep trying to figure it out.

Here's a test. Set up and start another capture and watch your little hard drive activity light. It should blip on about once a half-second or so. It should not go on bright and, for all practical purposes stay on.

Control-Alt-Delete > Task Manager > Processes. You should not need to page down more than once to get it all in. If you find yourself paging down three and four times, they you probably have too many install and de-installs and too many "Applications You Forgot About" and there's too much trash on your machine.

Virus Protection Packages do not protect against everything. Ask Microsoft to do their own thorough scan of your computer...

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/produc ... anner.mspx

This could take an hour depending on your machine and connection.

I'm sure I can come up with more, but that's a good list.

One more. Do you let the computer check its memory extensively when you turn the computer on? Like turn the machine on and go get coffee while it does a memory scan? Most people hate that, but I force all my machine to do it. There is another Microsoft tool that can do a hardware memory test on your machine. It creates and runs from a Floppy, but I think there is a version that runs from a recordable CD.

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

You let that run for hours. The official specification is to let it go through the complete suite of tests at least three times. I let it go overnight. Most healthy machines make it through all those tests while drinking tea with honey and watching "Dancing With The Stars" on TV. If there's anything wrong or slightly unstable with your machine, this test is very likely to crash. This is also known as the Big Guns Test.

Koz

Thanks, Koz, I'll try all that.

I set up and started another capture: recording lasted 48 seconds; there was no excessive activity in the HD light and less than a page of processes.

Can't remember how to set up the PC to check the memory. I thought I could set it up in the Bios but couldn't find the option there.

I downloaded and ran the Microsoft Safety Scan and the results were:
Protection: Status Good - No viruses or Spyware found
Performance: Status Bad - Found 314 Registry Items, 313 cleaned, 1 error, 0 skipped by user. Found 4.0 MB, cleaned or compressed 3.9MB of temporary and other files. Defragmenting is not necessary.

Been struggling with setting up the hardware memory test but think I have finally burnt the ISO file to a CD using Microsofts cdburn.exe. I will try booting up with the CD once I've read the User Manual and will let you know how I got on.