Audacity 1.2.6 Crash over long time recording?

[skchen001]

Hello everyone:

First I wanted to say I love Audacity program. I use it to record Internet Radio streaming overnight to record a 4 hour program, and use Audacity to timeshift and and create mp3 program to listen on mp3 player when I'm awake.

I record (through radiotime.com) on firefox with 44100Hz Sampling rate, 32 bit float sampling format, with fast sinc interpolation (real time), and high quality sample rate conveter, Real time dither (none), and High quality dither set at triangle.

I am using 1.2.6 Windows build date 11/13/06 with the following: mp3 importing enabled, Ogg Vorbis import enabled, ID3 tag export enabled, LADSPA Plug-in enabled, LADSPA Plug-in enabled, wxWindows 242.

Even though the target program recording lasts 4 hours, I usually ended up recording between 8-9 hours, and usually hit the "stop recording button" when I wake up, find the point where the program begin and ends, chop off sound recording not within the boundary and then export the program as a .MP3 program to listen.

Today was the 2nd time where the program crashed (maybe even firefox crashed - unknown cause), but it bothered me because my Laptop (Thinkpad T60) rebooted and the booting process claims not to find the hard drive. It was fixed with a cold boot. I did not see the cause of the reboot because I was sleeping.

I did not lose any data, thankfully -- I am looking in the Audacity temp directory and the recording has 7472 files (b0000.au - b07471.au) (windows reported 7.38 GB). Each of the bxxxxx.au file is 1,060,956 bytes.

I will run the Audacity Recovery program, and I don't think I lost any audacity data files. I am just wondering if the program ran into conditions that caused it to crash (or did I run into Microsoft Windows 32-bit issue?) I'm running windows xp home with the normal patches.

Overall, I am still glad to see the program very well behaved (recording .au files up to the point laptop rebooted). Normally I would ignore the reboot and just move on, but it was the "could not find boot drive" event that required a cold boot that motivated me to report this and see if others have similar experiences over long time recording (i.e. over 8-9+ hours), and if there is a potential bug after say recording over 7 Gig of recording sound over 1 sitting?

Thanks

Scott

[steve]

Good to see lots of detail in your post.

The usual killer for long recordings is simply running out of unfragmented disk space. As space gets low, the hard drive is having to skip all over the disk in search of available space, while all the time trying to keep up with the constant stream of data, then something happens. for example Windows decides that it needs more space for its swap file, and bang, you have a disk crisis and the entire computer crashes in a most ungraceful manner.

You've not actually said how much available (and unfragmented) disk space you have, but I'm assuming that you have also considered this possibility.

Audacity itself can handle extremely long recordings (I don't think there is any limit with Audacity 1.3), however, that does not mean that the rest of the computer will be able to cope. There have been reports that problems may occur when the file size exceeds 4GB - this is not a limit imposed within Audacity, but there could be other parts of the computer that get upset.

Two things that I would suggest:
1) Upgrade to Audacity 1.3.7 - this has a feature that enables you to make a timed recording by setting a start time and either a stop time, or entering the duration of the recording. (There are also many other advantages to 1.3.7 over the old 1.2.6 version)
2) drop the bit depth down to 16 bit. For recording from internet radio there is no advantage in using the higher bit depth, and cutting down to 16 bit will halve the file size and data throughput.

[kozikowski]

Especially if Windows had troubles coming back to life.

You didn't use nearly enough words like: "I checked the capacity of my hard drive," and "I error check and defragment every week."

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314848

Method 1

There is an error checker in that same panel. Don't repair anything.

Do you ever empty out the trash can? The Trash Can is a location on your hard drive. It's not "nothing." To permanently trash something you need to empty the can.

You may not need all that data, either. Music CD quality is 44100, 16-bit, Stereo. You only need 32-bit floating if you're going to do extensive production, special effects, and editing. If all you're going to do is listen on an iPod, 16-bit is more than enough and is more kind to hard drive space.

Koz

[skchen001]

In the end, I decided to switch out the old hard drive that came with my T60 because I was having intermittent problems and replaced it with a new larger and faster HD, re-installed the OS from the Recovery partition, and installed the 1.3.7 (beta).

I like the new feature that allows one to set the start and end time, and I haven't had any more system crashes.

Thank you for your help.

Scott