Audacity Forum

Hey everybody. I've been using Audacity to record cassette tapes for over a year now, and have generally had good results. But just the last few days I keep getting hangs. I'll start recording and everything will proceed as usual, with the waveform appearing on-screen. But once I click on the stop button, Audacity just grinds to a halt. I can't click anything else, and the program soon says "not responding" and never recovers. I have to close it through the task manager and lose whatever I recorded. (I get a message the next time I open it that I can manually recover temporary files, but I'm not sure how to do this.)

This is really quite puzzling to me, as I haven't seen this before (or at least not frequently), and everything else on my computer seems to run fine. I ran a virus and spyware scan and didn't find anything. I defragmented. I upgraded from Audacity 1.2.4 to 1.2.6. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. Nothing helps. Any ideas? I'm running Windows XP Professional x64.

It's possible that you have some corrupt temp files.

Open Audacity, if it asks to recover temporary files, say no.
Go to "Edit->Preferences->Directories" and have a look where your temp files are being stored.
Now use Windows Explorer to find the Audacity temporary directory.
Close Audacity
Delete any files that remain in the Audacity temporary folder.

Open Audacity again and cross your fingers
(let us know if this works)

I found the temp folder, but it was already empty. I tried deleting the folder itself just in case. Audacity recreated the same folder when I restarted it, and still hangs when I stop a recording.

Are there any more ideas about this? Is there a debugger that would give more details?

I've found a couple of other references to this problem, and it seems to be specific to x64. Unfortunately no clear solutions.
The other cases that I found were mostly using RealTek audio device, and the recommendations were to update the soundcard drivers.

Whether you have a RealTek audio device or not, it's worth checking that your soundcard drivers are up to date.

I have a Creative SB Audigy soundcard. The current drivers are Version 5.12.8.1164 from 12/8/2005, which does seem old. I've used Windows Update to move up to Version 6.0.1.1241 from 12/12/2006. And now it wants me to restart my computer, so I'll see what happens.

The driver update seemed to go fine, but I still can't stop a recording.

I do have x64, of course. It's strange that this just started. As I said, I'd used it for over a year with no regular problems. Is there anything else to do to track this down? I can upload the Windows error report if it would help, or get some more debugging information if I get instructions.

I'm still thinking that this may be a problem with temporary files. Does Audacity ALWAYS crash when you are recording and then click on the "Stop" button? (even with very short recordings?)

How much free space is there on each hard drive in your system?

If you "Save Project As" before you start recording, do you still have the problem?

For awhile, it would just crash sometimes, but lately it's crashing almost 100% of the time. I was about to say 100% of the time, but after playing around awhile I did stop a five-second recording successfully. I couldn't do it again, though. Deleting temporary files doesn't have any effect as far as I've seen.

There's just one hard drive, with 195GB free space.

I still had the problem saving the project first.

I'm running out of ideas on this one

Audacity was working fine, now it isn't, so something must have changed that is now messing it up. We need to find what has changed, or find a work around for this problem.

Fragmentation of the hard drive is a progressive deterioration on Windows machines, and while I think that it's unlikely to be so bad as to crash Audacity (considering the amount of free space on your hdd), defragging the drive will eliminate that as a cause and will benefit performance of your machine.

Some anti-virus and other security software can interfere with Audacity - since these products generally update quite frequently, it could be an update that is now causing the problem. Try disconnecting from the internet (shut down, unplug the internet connection and reboot), then disable or shut down your anti-virus, firewall and any other security programs. Then try Audacity and see if that makes a difference. If this fixes it, we may be able to configure he offending application so that it plays nicely.

Do you remember installing any new programs or hardware in between the time when Audacity was working, and when it stopped working?

Have you tried Audacity 1.3.4? Although it is called "beta", most people that use it find that it is perfectly stable. Using 1.3.4 is pretty similar to 1.2.x but with a few features in different places and some other enhancements. You can have both 1.2.x and 1.3.4 installed on your computer at the same time as long as they are installed in different directories (you can only run one at a time though).