Audacity Forum

Hi,
I'm trying to remove the noise from a rather large project, over 13 minutes. After about 3 minutes Audacity crashes. Any help would be appreciated.
...... john

Hard drive space. When you start doing heavy effects on a large file, Audacity suddenly has to come up with a ton of hard drive space to perform the analysis and work--and save the UNDO files.

How full are your drives, how many, and which one have you told Audacity to use for housekeeping?

Koz

Hi Koz,
It's an 8 gig drive, about half full. The data file is 280mbs. It just stops at about 3/4 of the way through, and exits Audacity, no warning, just as if I had closed it. (I'm using a modest noise reduction level (5db). This is after having removed the clicks.
..... john

That's cutting it close. You're supposed to say, "A small, fast 8G drive for the operating system and programs and then two 120G data drives for the music and shows.

The operating system has to store stuff in there dynamically, too, assuming there's only one drive.

When was the last time you defragmented the drive? If the answer is never, then Audacity can't find enough continuous drive space to do the work. Which Windows have you got?

Koz

Hi Koz,
My god. I had no idea. I thought 8 gig was PLENTY. I have defragged the drive. Let's see how that works.
P.S. I'm only using a P3, 800mhz, 512mbs ram.
Thanks,
john

Hi,
I still cannot remove noise from large files (in this case 9 minutes) withut audacity crashing. I tried defragging my drive after recording, still no luck. I have a 4 gigs of empty space on the drive.
....... john

Hi,
Just to let you know that I was able to do the noise reduction on this large file, if I did it in three sessions, and by saving and closing Audacity after each session.
Not good, but O.K.
I'm wandering - Does Audacity poll the rate of performing these functions, like noise removal, and is closing down when the rate drops below a certain threshold???
....... john

Hi,
I may have found the reason for Audacity's crashing during the Noise Removal process.
In the good old days of windows 95/98 I got into the habit of entering the command "conservativeswapfileusage=1" into system.ini, which, I believe, restricts windows use of the swap file. Well, recently I did a fresh install and entered this command again; so when Audacity started crashing, I made the connection and removed it. Result - no more crashes, at least so far. If I start getting crashes again, I'll report back. Thanks to everyone who tried to solve this problem. Hopefully we've seen the back of it.
....... john

shinnen wrote:Just to let you know that I was able to do the noise reduction on this large file, if I did it in three sessions, and by saving and closing Audacity after each session. Not good, but O.K

When you close Audacity, it will delete the temporary files, thus freeing up space on your hard drive which can be used again in your next Audacity Session.

shinnen wrote: "conservativeswapfileusage=1" into system.ini

This tells Windows not to use any Swap File until there is really no more free RAM left, which would therefore conserve a bit more hard disk space - the only thing with this is that it does not work with XP. It is not generally recommended for 98 either as it degrades performance.

A certain amount of hdd space could be made available by clearing out temporary files, emptying the recycle bin, deleting old system restore points and so on. Also the maximum size of Virtual Memory could be limited in "System Properties > Advanced > Performance > Settings > Advanced > Virtual Memory" But care must be taken to avoid making it too small and would generally be advised against.

When dealing with files this big you need LOTS of free space - 10 times the size of the file will allow 10 processes or edits, which will be around the minimum amount for a simple editing session. Each operation creates a backup that is roughly an equivalent size to the whole file that you are editing - for example, just loading your 130 MB (?) file and fading the ends will create temporary files approaching half a Gig.