Audacity Forum

I would like to be able to record and leave the program running but have it automaticly pause until there is some sound in the room. I want to let is run all night, but not eat up my storage, is there a setting were the program will pause during times of silence and then start recording when people start talking again?

I thank you for your time.

David J. Devlin
Victoria, BC, Canada.

What you want is Audacity 1.3.12 and Sound Activated Recording.

You can get Audacity 1.3.12 from here: http://audacityteam.org/download/beta_windows

Then in the Transport menu turn on Sound Activated Recording. You should also set the Sound Activation Level.

When you press the record button recording will be paused until the amplitude (volume) of the incoming sound goes over the defined threshold in sound activation level. It will record while the volume is over that threshold and pause every time it's quieter than that.

Audacity can make an interesting surveillance system. Particularly on a Windows machine, you have to keep plain Windows running 100% of the time which is remarkably difficult. We put a WinXP machine on-line running one application 24/7 and it's taken two of us a good long time to turn off all the Windows tools.

-- No Screen Saver
-- No Sleep
-- No Power Management
-- No Windows Update
-- No Virus Scanning or Updates
-- No helper programs
-- No auto defrag

etc.

Good luck.

Koz

How is it possible to define the length of the silence, because there might be short "blanks" in a conversation and then its starts again.

-- No Sleep
-- No Power Management

Obvious, but like gravity one tends to forget about it.

-- No Virus Scanning or Updates
-- No helper programs
-- No auto defrag

Why?


Thanks

feelthebeat wrote:How is it possible to define the length of the silence, because there might be short "blanks" in a conversation and then its starts again.

No, but I think there's a feature request for that... shall your vote be added?

I don't remember how it worked in 1.2 but in 1.3.13, the latest Beta, when you invoke the silince finder there is a "Minimum Duration of Silence" parameter that you can set (default is 1 second) - does that do what you need?

WC

feelthebeat wrote:

-- No Virus Scanning or Updates
-- No helper programs
-- No auto defrag

Why?

Because if Windows decides to defragment the hard drive (or any other disk intensive action) in the middle of the night and Audacity is trying to record, then disk access for Audacity will be severely limited and the recording will probably fail or have bits missing.

waxcylinder wrote:I don't remember how it worked in 1.2 but in 1.3.13, the latest Beta, when you invoke the silince finder there is a "Minimum Duration of Silence" parameter that you can set (default is 1 second) - does that do what you need?

WC

I think feelthebeat was talking about Sound Activated Recording...

bgravato wrote:

waxcylinder wrote:I don't remember how it worked in 1.2 but in 1.3.13, the latest Beta, when you invoke the silince finder there is a "Minimum Duration of Silence" parameter that you can set (default is 1 second) - does that do what you need?

WC

I think feelthebeat was talking about Sound Activated Recording...

Oops <hides face in hands in deep embarrassment>

One of these days I'll learn to read properly ...

WC

waxcylinder wrote:Oops <hides face in hands in deep embarrassment>

One of these days I'll learn to read properly ...

WC

No worries it often happens to me too