Can't save as mp3

[darsk]

I've been saving to mp3s for many months, but now today suddenly any attempt to do so causes the "Audacity has encountered a problem and must close" crash.

Am running XP, Audacity v1.3.4. I've tried uninstalling, reinstalling, redownloading the lame dll file. No change.

Please help!
Thanks

[kozikowski]

Sudden Unexplained Windows Insanity can be caused by several things: Are you running out of hard drive room? Do a Properties on your hard drive and see how much room you have. No production machine should have less than 10% free space.

Audacity will eventually fail if the hard drive is fragmented enough. Defrag early, defrag often.

When was the last time you did a virus scan? A manual comprehensive one with everything else closed, not that wimpy automatic one that runs in the background. If you can still use the computer while the virus scan is working, it's not doing a very good job.

Koz

[darsk]

Thanks for the reply. I regularly do the above mentioned things, and have stumbled upon what seems to be the cause and a partial solution:

I record weekly segments for a podcast. Most of the time I do this at the desktop computer using Audacity directly. BUT sometimes I record audio in the field using an ipod video and italk.

Audacity had no problems using the wav files created by the ipod - until now. Last week, Apple forced an update to the ipod software (via itunes). I suspect there was a change to the .wav file format that Audacity finds to be incompatible.

The solution... about half the time: I change the sample rate or sample format, then it sometimes works fine and I can again save .mp3 files. If I don't use audio from the ipod, then there is no problem.

Thanks