Problem with a long recording
Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2010 4:17 pm
Hi, I'm a total newbie when it comes to Audacity and recording stuff in general. I checked the FAQs and some of the old threads to see if my issue had come up before, but didn't see anything so I thought I'd post and ask if anyone knew what was happening with me.
I was recording a gaming session with some friends (something we've just recently decided to start doing). The session ran very long (about 9 hours), but Audacity seemed to be recording without any problem--I had plenty of disk space and the input levels were constant the whole way through. When we finally finished I went ahead to export the whole thing onto an external hard drive (I record on a laptop and do my sound editing on a separate computer). It was late, so rather than divy up the whole file into a bunch of smaller tracks (which I admit probably would have been the smart thing to do), I just dumped the whole file onto my external drive and ended up with like a 5 gigabyte file. Again, everything seemed to export without a hitch, and once it was finished I removed the hard drive with Window's "Safely Remove Hardware" function and called it night.
However, the problem came the next day when I tried to edit the file. Despite being like 5 gigs in size, the whole recording is only 2 hours long--after that it just cuts off. This isn't a first time we've recorded a session, and I've still got a 2-hour and 3-hour recording on my drive as well that are like 1-2 gigs respectively--how it is I can have a file that's almost twice the size and yet not as long tells me that maybe the recording is still in there somehow but won't play fully for some reason.
I'm at a loss as to what to do at this point. I would hate to lose that entire recording, and would greatly appreciate any help or guidance that could be provided.
The recording was done with Audacity 1.2.6 on a laptop running Win XP Service Pack 3. The computer I do my editing on is running Windows 7, so I don't know if that could be responsible for the issue or not--I normally export the recordings to raw WAV files to try and prevent any issues with the difference in OS.
Thank again for your time.
I was recording a gaming session with some friends (something we've just recently decided to start doing). The session ran very long (about 9 hours), but Audacity seemed to be recording without any problem--I had plenty of disk space and the input levels were constant the whole way through. When we finally finished I went ahead to export the whole thing onto an external hard drive (I record on a laptop and do my sound editing on a separate computer). It was late, so rather than divy up the whole file into a bunch of smaller tracks (which I admit probably would have been the smart thing to do), I just dumped the whole file onto my external drive and ended up with like a 5 gigabyte file. Again, everything seemed to export without a hitch, and once it was finished I removed the hard drive with Window's "Safely Remove Hardware" function and called it night.
However, the problem came the next day when I tried to edit the file. Despite being like 5 gigs in size, the whole recording is only 2 hours long--after that it just cuts off. This isn't a first time we've recorded a session, and I've still got a 2-hour and 3-hour recording on my drive as well that are like 1-2 gigs respectively--how it is I can have a file that's almost twice the size and yet not as long tells me that maybe the recording is still in there somehow but won't play fully for some reason.
I'm at a loss as to what to do at this point. I would hate to lose that entire recording, and would greatly appreciate any help or guidance that could be provided.
The recording was done with Audacity 1.2.6 on a laptop running Win XP Service Pack 3. The computer I do my editing on is running Windows 7, so I don't know if that could be responsible for the issue or not--I normally export the recordings to raw WAV files to try and prevent any issues with the difference in OS.
Thank again for your time.
