Audacity Forum

Can anyone please help? I have recorded both sides of an LP (40mins, 12 tracks) and when trying to burn this onto a blank CD I am told that there is insufficient space as the recording is 827 MB. The CD holds 702 MB and is equal to 80 mins. Am I overlooking something fundamental? Len.

You are probably trying to burn a data CD rather than a music CD - this will be controlled by a setting/switch in your CD burner software. The WAV files on a data CD will take up more space than the equivalent files on a music CD - and a data CD with WAVs will not play in CD players.

Also, you are exporting your WAVs at 44.1kHz, 16-bit, stereo (the Red Book CD standard) aren't you?

WC

40 mins of 44.1kHz 32 bit stereo is approx 800MB
40 Mins of 44.1kHz 16 bit stereo is approx 400MB

Looks like you have exported as 32 bit instead of the 16 bit that you need for audio CDs.

stevethefiddle wrote:40 mins of 44.1kHz 32 bit stereo is approx 800MB
40 Mins of 44.1kHz 16 bit stereo is approx 400MB

Looks like you have exported as 32 bit instead of the 16 bit that you need for audio CDs.

Many thanks Steve, I will look into your comment. I now have further information;
If I go to "my computer" and then to DVD-RW drive. I have a file waiting to be written to the CD. If I open this file, it consists of files from ; b00000. to b00827, presumably 1MB per file?
I am at a loss to understand why there should be so many files for a 12 part 40 min recording.
Anyway, I will now go back to Audacity and see how to change to 16 bit. Regards, Len.

Len wrote:I am at a loss to understand why there should be so many files for a 12 part 40 min recording.

Yeh - beats me too

What CD burning software are you using?
If you're on Windows, see if you can get hold of a copy of Nero Express - it's dead easy to use and does the job.
For a free program, FinalBurner Free is supposed to be pretty good (not tried it myself) http://protectedsoft.com/download.php
For Linux, K3B is the dogs bits (IMHO)

Len,

The problem here is that you seem to be trying to write the Audacity project to CD instead of a WAV file.

You need to open that project in Audacity and use the File -> Export function to get a WAV file. You can burn WAV files to CD (again, make sure it's an audio CD, I'm not sure if Windows CD burning software can write audio CDs).

Also, this wiki page details the Export Multiple process. You can use that process to make each song on the LP into it's own CD track, instead of having 1 track for each side of the LP (it's a bit more work, but it's worth it), you should read this:
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... ate_tracks

stevethefiddle wrote:

Len wrote:I am at a loss to understand why there should be so many files for a 12 part 40 min recording.

Yeh - beats me too

Steve & Len,

Audacity does it this way to avoid having to manage one humungously large file while it is recording - it enables the program to write out small files very frequently. This gives a performance advantage - one that is likely to be necessary on lower-powered macines and for multi-track recording. It is quite logical that the program designers built it this way.

The only problem with the project file structure is that it is extremely sensitive to moving/renaming files within the structure - to the extent of losing parts or all of a project - so my advice is don't mess with it ....

There are tools provided to export your completed (or intermediate, for working backup) project to WAV/AIFF - and to MP3 (with added LAME).

WC

Many thanks to everyone for all their useful help. I can now transfer music from an LP to CD and it plays on any CD player. However, I now find that when playing, I cannot use the skip control. I have printed off the information "Splitting recordings into separate tracks" but it is not easy to follow and anyway does not mention use of the skip control. Has anyone met this problem? Len.

Well that's some progress.

It sounds like you are now able to export the wav file and burn it to CD, but you are probably burning it as one long continuous track.

The aim of doing the "Export Multiple" is to end up with a number of wav files - one for each track on your CD.
It is most important that you have labels at the beginning, and between each track. The labels act as markers, so that "Export Multiple" knows where each track starts and ends, and is then able to export each section as a wav file.

An alternative to using Export Multiple is to continue exporting to one long file and then make a CUE sheet and use some special CD-burning software to burn it.

I posted about it here:
http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 7333#p7333