Stopped recording last night.

[amcflfan]

I have been using Audacity to produce a half hour music show for a little over three months now with no problems at all. Then...Last night 4/15/2010 after recording 15 minutes of this weeks show, I went to do a voice over to intro the next song and the vertical line that moves to the right as you record was blinking and not moving. Audacity is no longer recording in the current project. As far as I can tell I have done nothing wrong. Not knowing computers all that well I tend to never touch any buttons or click on anything that I don't know about. Can anyone help? show needs to be finished and uploaded by tonight.

Thanks.

[steve]

This can be caused by Audacity loosing connection to your sound card. Have you tried rebooting?

If that doesn't work we'll need to look a bit deeper, but to do so will need a bit more information:
What operating system are you using? (Vista? XP? Win 7?)
Exactly which version of Audacity? (look in "Help > About Audacity")
What are you recording from? (USB microphone, a computer microphone? a microphone plugged into a USB sound card? - model numbers can be useful here).
Any other information that you think may be relevant?

[fjvanittersum]

I'am a rather new Audicity user. I started with 1.26 under Windows XP Professional, SP 3. I did some recordings with the M-Audio USB Duo Sport (an external Mic preamp, driver Duo128.exe). The sound quality of Audacity is perfect, but recordings stop after a few minutes (sometimes 3 minutes, sometimes 4 minutes). Suddenly the the vertical line starts blinking and stops moving.

This problems happens suddenly after starting a recording by pressing the red button. At this moment, it happens during all recordings I start. In the beginning, it only occurred after pressing the "Pause"-button during a recording.

My project sample frequency is 44100 Hz, sample format 16-bit.

Perhaps you have suggestion to solve my problem.

Thanks !

Frans van Ittersum

[steve]

For audio recording you need to have plenty of free, unfragmented disk space.
How much free disk space do you have?
Have you defreagmented your hard drive recently?

[fjvanittersum]

I have 74.6 GB free disk space. The analysis of Windows XP Pro is that is it unnecessary to defragment my harddisk.
Are any other options ?

[kozikowski]

<<<Are any other options ?>>>

Yes, do a manual defragmentation anyway. This is very typical of Audacity not being able to find enough clear drive space to do the work. We're not saving or recalculating Excel Spreadsheets. Live audio (and video) doesn't wait. If you play B-flat above C and there isn't enough drive space immediately available to capture it, the capture will crash.

The machine could be doing other things, too. Are you trying to do email or surf or Skype while you record? Probably a bad idea.

Control-Alt-Delete > Task Manager > Processes. One of the PC Systems people has a rule of thumb. If that list goes over about a page, you have way too much stuff running "in the background" on your machine.

Koz

[kozikowski]

You can also get into trouble with your virus program, both too much and not enough. If your machine is busy attacking the Pentagon "in the background," it will slow down -- just a little, but it might be enough to cause problems.

If this has never worked, then your virus program may be carefully inspecting every single access of the hard drive. This will kill Audacity every time. Take your computer off-line, disable the virus software and see if the problems go away.

Koz

[kozikowski]

It's also a standing joke that many of the elves will tell you to upgrade to Audacity 1.3.12 before they say hello. Audacity 1.2 was designed just after the Hindenburg went down and it doesn't always get along with all modern computers any more.

Koz