Audacity Forum

Hi,

I have been mixing an Audacity Project, which now has many audio tracks on it (~100) and have had no problems thus far. Suddenly however, every time I press the Play button Audacity crashes with a "Windows error" message screen ("unhandled exception"?).

I am using Windows Vista Home Premium.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling with no results. Also tried re-installing the beta and I still get the error whenever I press play.

Any ideas? I was thinking I added one too many Audio Tracks? Is that possible?

Thank you in advance.

Just for further clarification, I can open my saved Audacity Project just fine, it only crashes when I press the play button. And the exact error message received when I press the play button is:

"audacity.exe has stopped working. A problem has caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available."

I'm starting to suspect my specific Audacity Project which crashes when I press the Play button is corrupted.

If I start a new Project and try to Play, Audacity does not crash.

Could this be because the Audacity Project in question which crashes upon play simply has too many Audio Tracks?

OK, I'm pretty sure I've isolated the problem to too many Audio Tracks. If I remove even one track, it will play. Once I add another track and attempt to Play, it crashes.

Is this a known problem and is there any possible resolution so I can complete my Audacity Project? I need more Audio Tracks but apparently I can't create any without crashing.

Is it a RAM issue?

samn wrote:Could this be because the Audacity Project in question which crashes upon play simply has too many Audio Tracks?

Audacity itself will handle LOTS of tracks, but whether or not the hardware can cope is another matter.
Check that you have plenty of free and defragmented drive space.

Save your project under a different name ("Save As" from the File menu) then you can mess around and try to recover it without fear of destroying the original project.

Audacity 1.2 does not have very good crash recovery, so be careful with the original project.

When you have made a copy of the project (make that 2 copies if you have enough hard drive space), try mixing down some of the tracks (Quick Mix) to substantially reduce the number of tracks, and see if you can get it to play.

For working on big projects like this I would definitely recommend updating to a more recent version of Audacity. Unfortunately the later versions are still beta versions, but having said that, I find that the latest 1.3.9 version is more stable with complex projects than the old 1.2.6 version. Don't try upgrading until you have rescued this project, but as soon as you have, then upgrade.

Oh and another thought - Audacity will run more efficiently if all of the tracks have the same sample rate as the Project sample rate. If you have any tracks that are at different sample rates to the project you could convert them to the project sample rate.

Thanks for the help, I upgraded to 1.3.8 and it still crashed on Play.

I exported my Project as an MP3 and File->New Project, then imported it in. My own ghetto way of Quick Mixing. I didn't know how to Quick Mix in 1.3.8.

That seems to let me play the File, I'll let you know if I have any problems down the road adding new Tracks.

Thanks again Steve

samn wrote:I didn't know how to Quick Mix in 1.3.8.

"Track" menu > "Mix and Render"

Each time you Export as MP3, the MP3 compression causes a bit of sound quality loss. It's best to keep everything as uncompressed audio until you have finished the project. WAV files are uncompressed, so although they are much bigger files than MP3s, you don't get the lowering of sound quality that is inherent with MP3s.