Audacity crashes on long recordings

[rbaguley]

I am trying to use Audacity to record the results of some battery tests that we do. This involves making recordings of anything from 2-3 to 24-36 hours. However, Audacity crashes when I do the longer ones. Case in point; for a recording I just tried starting at about 3pm yesterday, the program seemed to record fine for the first 5-6 hours, but when I came in and checked it this morning, the track was blank. The program responded to key presses, but locked up when I tried to save the project. Any ideas? Details are below.

Audacity version 1.2.6, running on a Windows XP dell desktop with 2GB of RAM. The system has two soundcards, but the one it is recording from is a CardDeluxe (an M-Audio Delta 1010 is also installed in this system, as is the Virtual Audio Cable virtual sound card software). I am recording at 44100Hz stereo, but have had similar problems with recording at other bitrates.

Any ideas?

[kozikowski]

<<<Audacity crashes when I do the longer ones>>>

I'm not shocked.

Audacity, particularly the early 1.2 version, is a very simple program and depends on its proper operation for the machine on which it's running to be really simple, too.

<<<The system has two soundcards>>>

So right away, you don't have a simple machine. You have at least two different Windows device drivers in there trying to share the machine. Audacity hates oddball sound configurations and even if this has nothing whatever to do with your problem, it muddies the waters and makes the system harder to fix.

Whenever Windows users post a question, I would just as soon they start like this:

I ran the error check and defragmented my hard drive thoroughly and made sure it had over half its space left free. I updated my virus protection software and did the comprehensive system scan. When that didn't help, I disconnected my machine from the network and temporarily disabled my virus software.

It still didn't help.

Now here's my question...

Koz

[steve]

There have been some posts that suggest that 32 bit Operating systems can run up against a 4 GB limit similar to the limit for WAV files (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV ). This may not be a problem with recent versions of Audacity, and may not be a problem with 64 bit machines with 64 bit OS's. (I don't have the hardware to check any of this).