Can I Record On The Fly?

[mrdinklez]

I'm about to record a large amount of audio at one time. Does audacity store all the recordings in memory before you output and save the file. Or can it record and output the file on the fly. The reason I want to know this is so that I don't run out of memory while I record this massive amount of audio.

Thanks for your time. Give specfic instructions if you know the answer to my problem.

[kozikowski]

Audacity will not create WAV or MP3 files as it goes. Straight capture and playback from internal buffers are the only two things Audacity does in real time.

Audacity keeps captured work in tiny snippets in a system directory. There's no theoretical limit to how long you can go and it's not limited by internal memory.

However, there are lots of practical limits. There are a number of postings about being unable to get the show out of Audacity because of filesystem or other limits. For a one hour show, figure 700MB per hour, double that for undo and increase it again for special effects or other processing. So with no effort at all, we're up to 2GB per hour of edited show even if the final output isn't that big. The system has to be able to handle that.

WAV format cuts you off at the knees because of its filesize limit of 4GB, so even if you do manage to manage an enormous show, you may not be able to get it out of Windows.

There are other problems. Audacity will not work into a fragmented drive and the target drive should never get much over half full to avoid speed problems. Oh, and you might bump into Windows' own 2GB and 4GB limits.

Etc, etc.

What was the job and what do you consider a "large show?

There was reputed to be one developer who managed a very large, multi-hour recording, but some very special provisions had to be made. For one thing, the machine certainly can't be doing anything else, and there's a better than even chance he wasn't in Windows.

Koz

[waxcylinder]

There was reputed to be one developer who managed a very large, multi-hour recording, but some very special provisions had to be made. For one thing, the machine certainly can't be doing anything else, and there's a better than even chance he wasn't in Windows.

Cm'on Koz - even Windows will handle multi-hour recordings perfectly well on a properly configured machine with plenty of (defragged) disk space. When Timed Recording occasionally exhibits it's known bug of not stopping at the specified time, I end uup with recordings of several hours still recording merrily away when I get up the following morning ...

WC

[kozikowski]

<<<What was the job and what do you consider a "large show?>>>

We still didn't get that answer.

Koz