recording length?

[southpaw_pete]

Hi All,

Never used Audacity before, but I'm in a pinch and hope it can help! My boss is delivering a seminar tomorrow, around 3 hours in length, and he's asked me to record it.

Is Audacity capable of recording continuously for this kind of time period? Are there any settings I'd need to adjust to do so?

I'm sorry this are perhaps basic questions, but I need to know if it'll work, then demo to the boss this afternoon, so i'm a bit up against it!!

Many thanks

Pete

[waxcylinder]

Yes provided that you have enough disk space - and providing the processor is fast enough to handle realtime digital audio capture (no problem for modern PCs).

Personally I would be using 1.3.9 rather than 1.2. In spite of the beta labelling, i.3.x is pretty stable now (approaching a release soon) - and in contrast 1.2 is ancient.

I would also be experimenting today to make sure that you can record correctly, mic the speaker correctly, setting sound levels etc. This will be a critical one-shot recording (no re-shoot of the movie ...) so you'd better make as sure as possible that you get it right.

BTW I would set your Audacity settings to 16-bit stereo 44.1kHz (which is the Red Book standard for CDs). Using the 16-bit rather than Audacity's default setting of 32-bit-floating - this will halve your disk spavce requirements and will still give you good quality.

AND as soon as you have finished recording Export the show as a WAV file - and back it up on a different disk. These will be your safety copies that you can go back to - the raw recording prior to any processing. (Don't rely on the Audacity projects alone - they can be brittle/fragile sometimes (you have been warned .

Update: oh - and don't be tempted to consider using an external drive or network drive to do the capture - these devices are seldom fast enough. Use your onboard drive(s) - and make sure they are defragged.

Good luck,
WC

[steve]

Have a practice tonight so that you know what you're doing tomorrow.