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Audacity frozen after saving BIG file

Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 4:36 pm
by Petwoip
I recorded a 14 hour track yesterday (not a life-threateningly important track, but would be annoying to re-record). I never stopping to save because I didn't want to disrupt the recording (plus, I've done this sort of thing successfully before). When the recording was over and I hit Save-As, Audacity started to save my project file. However, I noticed that it only managed to save one 6-second chunk (and had weird sound quality). Also, for the main file, the program became completely inactive, essentially frozen (this happened before I played the 6-second sample). I clicked on the screen but would be greeted by one of those *ding* sounds Windows makes when you click on a program that has a dialog box open. It didn't say "Audacity (Not Responding)", but obviously it froze. Also, after playing that 6-second chunk, that Audacity window froze as well. In both cases, the cursor line blinks and the start/end numbers blink.

I figure Audacity got stuck saving the file, thus it acts like it's in the middle of an operation that will never end, and that's why I can't select anything. Most importantly, I would like to know what I can do to save my data or stop the save process. Just remember, my _data folder only has one 6-second chunk of music, so most conventional strategies of recovery seem inapplicable. Also, I never saved the project beforehand. I'm using Windows 7, but tell me if you need more details than that.


Thanks for any help

Re: Audacity frozen after saving BIG file

Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 4:40 pm
by Petwoip
Ugh, I accidentally quit Audacity. A dialog popped up that told me I could recover the project files. The 6-second sample got recovered, the 14 hour one was blank. Looks like I can't do anything at this point...

Re: Audacity frozen after saving BIG file

Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 6:25 pm
by kozikowski
Very special provisions must be made for Audacity to record many hours. Special operating systems, special drives. You are looking for a surveillance recorder.

Even if you do manage to get the show back together, you need to be very careful how you export the sound files. WAV sound files will not go over 4GB. Many Magic things happen on long shows.

Crash Recovery
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... shRecovery

Did you run out of hard drive? Audacity always captures in high quality which could be 2GB per hour. Do you have 58GB of hard drive space available, plus room for the operating system and everything else, say 80GB free space, clean and defragmented?

Koz