Audacity Forum

I would assume that there's a word or term that describes what I want to do, but I don't know what it is. Spelled out, what I want is to have a constant recording of just the last 60 seconds of audio. I'll be recording live speech and want to be able to easily jump back and re-play something if I didn't catch an important detail. I don't want to waste disk recording huge wav files for long periods of time. Is there a way to get Audacity to do this, recording up to 60 seconds of audio and letting the oldest data fall off the end, so to speak?

In a word, "no".

-- Bill

If anyone can suggest some OTHER software for the Mac that could do what I want, I would much appreciate it!

Audio Hijack Pro cannot do exactly what you want, but can record directly to MP3 and split files (i.e. close one file and start another) at any interval you choose. A bit of kludge for what you want to do. You could let Audio Hijack record the audio, then listen to what it produces by opening the files in Audacity. You'd still need to delete the files you don't want. But since it can record to MP3 disk usage would be minimized.

-- Bill

In abbreviated form, you want surveillance software. Record a continuous loop sometimes months long depending on your hard drive capacity and drop in anywhere and listen or export as much as you want. You can record over the months long loop repeatedly, or you can make it stop so you can archive one single loop while the software is creating the second one.

The software provides time and date stamps.

Sound about right? Our system is much larger than what you need and it does video, but that's the Google search term. No, Audacity won't do that.

Koz

I don't even really need this to be usable in Audacity, that just happens to be the audio recording app I have handy and that's why I came to these forums. I actually have a copy of Audio Hijack Pro, I hadn't thought of trying to use it for this but I can give it a try. I'll also look into "survaillance" software, it makes sense that that's what would have this feature, although that isn't what I'm using it for. This is more like a cockpit voice recorder

The original ones of those had a continuous loop of audio tape. When the power in the plane went off, the tape stopped.Koz

use a cassette recorder
buy a 60second looped tape as used for phonemachine announcements

you always have the last 60 seconds available if you want to replya it

else just let audacity run
pretend it is an infinite loop of tape
back up 60 seconds or whatever if you want to hear that