Windows restarts when trying to record

[andys]

Hello.

I'm new to Audacity, and I was wondering if anyone could help with a problem I have been having in Audacity 1.2.6 for Windows XP - I've not been able to find an answer by searching.

Basically, whilst trying to record from the Line In, the system will crash, usually within 10 or 20 seconds of starting to record. The crash takes the form of an instant system re-boot - just as if I had pressed the reset button on the front of the computer. There are no errors, blue screens, beep codes etc.

I can record successfully from Line In using an old copy of Wavelab, and Audacity works fine exporting my Wavelab .wavs to .mp3, but I would prefer to be able to do it all in Audacity!

My system is Windows XP Home, with the motherboard's on-board sound card (Realtek AC97 Audio).

I have tried the following to resolve the issue, based on the solutions to other people's problems:

- made sure my audio capture settings are sensible (2 channel stereo, 16bit, 44.1kHz via Realtek AC97)
- tried using either a regular user or an administrator account
- disabling antivirus/internet security
- defragmenting the drives
- recording onto either a NTFS or FAT32 drive, each with enough free space

To the best of my knowledge I am free of malware, and don't have much "stuff" running in the background which might interfere.

I have also tried the latest "unstable" release of Audacity, which exhibits the same behaviour.

Can anyone suggest what might be causing the problem?

Thanks in advance for your ideas,

Andy.

[steve]

Have a look here: http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6588

[andys]

Steve - thanks, that's partially fixed the problem. I edited the audacity.cfg per your suggestion to octogenarian, and changed input to "Microsoft Sound Mapper", and the computer no longer crashes on record.

HOWEVER - instead, the recording now sounds "jumpy" - it's hard to describe, but sounds like a breaking-up DAB radio signal.

Following octogenarian's experience I might try updating the sound drivers.

Also - this raises an interesting point though. The very top line of audacity.cfg mentioned version 1.3.5. I have both 1.3.5 and 1.2.6 and assumed they were independent, but the audacity.cfg is clearly in a common location and shared between the two.

Thanks for the advice

Andy.

[steve]

The very top line of audacity.cfg mentioned version 1.3.5. I have both 1.3.5 and 1.2.6 and assumed they were independent, but the audacity.cfg is clearly in a common location and shared between the two.

The audacity.cfg file is only used by Audacity v.1.3.x
Audacity 1.2.x uses the windows registry.

If you have multiple versions of Audacity 1.3.x they will (by default) share the same cfg file.

When you install Audacity 1.3.x onto a machine that has, or has previously had 1.2.x installed, some settings will be copied from the 1.2.x registry settings into the new 1.3.x cfg file.

This article explains how to reset each version: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... references