Audacity Forum

I am new to Audacity.

I am hoping to use audacity to describe meetings, some of which run for hours at a time. I have two questions:

Can audacity record for long periods conveniently or will it take up too much memory (even on 16-bits)?

Also, I will need to transcribe portions of these meetings. Is it possible to vary the playback speed on Audacity?

Thanks for any help?

If the meetings are just people talking to each other and not theatrical performances and you don't need extensive post-production later, then Audacity default preferences are a complete waste of time. Reset to 44100, 16-bit, Mono. That's the most efficient way to capture very, very good quality mono work. That's the mono version of Music CD Quality.

Given that, you can expect to soak up about 600M of storage for every two hours. How long was the longest meeting? You can only sit in a conference room just so long before you rot. This is assuming you're not extending the definition of "meeting" to include the entire Friday 12-hour dance party on BBC1.

You need to make sure your Mac is in terrific shape. Run Disk Utilities > Verify Disk and Repair Permissions. You need at least 10% free space on your machine for any kind of serious production -- after capture. More is better and there are producers that don't leave the house without 20% free. Do you have Mac Janitor? Download and run that or run the Periodic Command Line Utilities.

Do you have Mac/Leopard/Intel? Then you have the wrong Audacity. There are known instabilities with that 1.2.5 combination and for us, the only workable version is Audacity 1.3.7.

If you have Mac/Intel/Tiger, then you can run Audacity 1.2.5, not 1.2.6.

If at all possible, I would stop periodically and Export As WAV. Do Not Save Audacity Projects.

Audacity needs to be the only thing running when you do this. No network, no updates, no email, no Skype, no squat. Audacity doesn't share well.

That should cover it.

<<<Is it possible to vary the playback speed on Audacity?>>>

Not the way you want, no. It's possible, but only in a production environment, not real time playback. Audacity does not "scrub." Somebody once discovered a software package that allowed sound management for transcribing. Search the forum.

<<<I am hoping to use audacity to describe meetings>>>

How are you getting the meetings into the Mac?

Koz