not recording anymore, system resources?

[tomd]

have been using audacity 1.2 for a while and was working great untill a few days ago. when i hit record it just stops at zero and there is no movement in the monitor input window. f.a.q says this is a system resources issue and i should reboot, been there, done that. no luck. built in card is working but is crap. do sound cards die?? what else could this be?
cheers
tom

[kozikowski]

How full is your hard drive? No audio (or video) production machine should ever be over 90% full.

Koz

[tomd]

nah its got heaps of space, the computer is on the way out but runs other apps no problem so i dunno. im fresh out of ideas on this one i thought i just changed a setting somewhere by accident but not the case.
cheers

[JeffB]

Doesn't windows have a feature where you can check your sound card? I think you might be able to do so on at least some minimal level by looking at the hardware in the control panel. If it really is cooked it might show up as malfunctioning there.

If that doesn't show any problems, I wonder if it might be worth trying uninstalling and reinstalling Audacity.

[tomd]

have reinstalled a few times, control panel says its functioning fine, but could be lie...

[alatham]

Sound cards can die. I've seen it happen. It's rare though.

Have you updated any drivers recently? Or changed the recording settings in Audacity?

[tomd]

cheers for the reply. no i havn't updated any drivers recently or changed any settings. it was working fine one day then gone the next. surely the fact that it records on the built in sound card is a clue somehow? e.g. cant be disk space, audacity is workin....
thanks
tom

[kozikowski]

I don't think we ever established what you're actually doing other than it doesn't work any more.

What are you doing? Analog audio to the sound card and then on to Audacity?

Koz

[tomd]

im recording mixes using serato scratch live on another comp (mac) so im not sure if its considered analog or digital, but probably digi. a line out from my mixer and cabled to mic input on the p.c.
cheers

[kozikowski]

<<<was working great untill a few days ago.>>>

Working great? No distortion or fuzzy audio? The line output of a mixer is roughly 1000 times higher than the microphone input of a sound card. That doesn't usually work very well.

This is considered an analog transfer, by the way. It may digital ones and zeros on both ends, but it's analog volts in the middle.

I'm going over the notes. You know that you can click anywhere inside the red Audacity meters and they will indicate the incoming volume without you sending Audacity into into full record, right? This is a great troubleshooting tool. Do you get bouncing lights at the right times when you play the Mac? Do you get any bouncing lights when you do that?

I'm going with the broken sound card opinion. The sound card is supposed to form a digital bitstream no matter what the incoming analog sound is. If it doesn't, or there's something wrong with it, then Audacity will just hang.

There's also the theory that the stable version of Audacity is the window through which you see your computer. If your machine is already busted a little, then it's going to really be busted if you try to run Audacity on it.

Koz