Audacity Forum

I was going to use audacity to record an all day meeting we are having in the office... Is there a "cap" on the length of a recording?

In theory, no. BUT...

While Audacity will handle very long recordings, at some stage you will want to export the recording as an audio file, and Windows places a practical limit on the file size it can handle. A "standard" WAV file (44100Hz, 16-bit stereo) uses 700MB per hour, and Windows will not handle files larger than 4GB.

If you are just recording speech, you can reduce the file size in half by recording in mono, but I would recommend breaking the recording into approximately one-hour chunks and exporting them as WAV files, in any case. You're going to have to take some breaks during the meeting, and you can use these to export the files.

You discover the other reason for breaking up the files when someone trips over the power lead to the laptop at the end of the meeting, and you discover the battery hasn't worked in three months. "Where's my seven-hour recording gone?"

PO'L

You should probably investigate a surveillance system. There's no really good reason Audacity can't record for multiple hours, but there are some practical limitations.

The machine can't be doing anything else and should not have any other programs on it that could conflict with Audacity -- Skype comes to mind. The machine needs enormous quantities of clean clear, error-free, thoroughly defragmented drive space. Live capture consumes about 700 MB of drive space per hour and that number goes way up when you press stop and need to do production -- like editing and filtering.

The short answer is you can't do this on a daily-use laptop.

WAV files will not support shows over 4GB, so that's about a four-hour limitation in the exported work. You can export MP3, but the machine has to think about compression when you do that -- See: large amounts of drive space, error free, etc. etc.

Nobody can sit still for eight hours, so there's always a lunch break. That's a good time to break up the recording into manageable chunks. I wouldn't go over 2 hours at a crack, but that's just me.

I wouldn't be doing this in Audacity 1.2. Audacity 1.3.11 or 1.3.12 are much more stable over a long capture.

If you get this all together, set it recording when you go to bed at night. When you get up in the morning, see if it's still alive. Don't be the poster who downloaded Audacity and walked into a 16 hour recording session and now wants to know to rescue his crashed show.

Which is very important.

Koz

noslenwerd wrote:I was going to use audacity to record an all day meeting we are having in the office... Is there a "cap" on the length of a recording?

yes and no
easier to just hit stop and start every 20-30 minutes or so when there is a break in the speech , between speakers, or just tell them to shut up for a moment if you need every golden syllable. you will get multiple shorter tracks instead of one humongous one.

when they take a coffee break or whatever then save the project and if time export wav files too.

not sure why, but i would close audacity and restart after the saves. i seem to have had buffer problem symptoms and that seemed to help. worst case, i have had to reboot.

so you might want a spare pc to alternate recording with.
or even something like an H2 zoom that can go for 4 hours to an SD card, for backup if it is really really important.

I can record for only 15 minutes , then the programme crashes.However I am able to record on to CD the first 15 minutes sucessfully. Why is it crashing after 15 minutes?, I did not previously have this problem.

How much free disk space do you have?

What exactly are you recording and what's your recording system made up of? (which Windows version, what sort of sound card, etc,)