Audacity Forum

Hi everyone.
Brand new here to the forums not to Audacity.
QUESTION: Can i recover the audio at all?

SITUATION:
This is the Second time this has happened to me. So i was recording from Line in and all looked as if it was fine untill the window stopped scrolling across to 'blank space' on the right. Audio was still passed through to the headphone outlet and the I/O meter was still moving to the audio.

I got the rainbow wheel and it just hung there. and nothing it wouldn't respond to anything not for 2 hours. the only way to end it was to force quit the program or shut down the computer.
I'm on a 17" MacBook Pro, OSX 10.5.5 2.4GHz Intel 2GB Ram. Audacity is 1.2.5

There is no where i can see the audio from looking around.

There was no crash log for todays event however i have an older crash log form what i am assuming is the 1st time it happened. This happened on 2 different users on the one machiene.

This is the latest crash log that i have for Audacity there are 3 others i dont know if they are any help. if you would like them let me know.,

Crashdump removed

Difficult to do in 1.2.x (IIRC a couple of folks managed it once) - but usually in 1.2 it's too hard to do it, or you may not have all the components that you need. 1.3.x recovery is much improved - I had to use it myself last week after an Audacity crash - and ir recobered the whole 9 hours no trouble.

I'm guessing that you didnt save the project before recording. If so you wil need to look in the folder that you have set to be Audacity's temporary folder. What you are looking for is a whole load of little .au files - these are the soundclips that make up the recording. Once a project is saved these are threaded together by a <your_project_name>.aup file. You may be able to thread thses all together by hand if you are lucky - otherwise it's a lost recording.

WC

How full is your hard drive? Some production people won't even leave the house unless they have at least 20% free space available. Sudden Computer Insanity can be cause by the machine running out of drive. UNIX systems treat hard drive as slow, sloppy memory, so having a drive problem is the equivalent of bad memory. The UNIX trifecta is getting the drive so full that it won't let you take anything off. The machine then becomes a house plant.

Please don't post a crash report unless we ask for it. The forum isn't that big.

Koz

My hard drive had >10Gb free space i think closer to 15Gb. I did save the project before recording and in the folder where it was saved there was a heap of the files mentioned but they only made up 1m 30sec which is what i saw when i went to the computer after the show.

<<<I got the rainbow wheel and it just hung there.>>>

You get the Spinning Beach Ball Of Death (SBBOD) when the system thinks access to the hard drive or other memory system is taking too long. At 10G, we start seriously looking for things to throw out. You can use up 10G very rapidly in a long live capture.

Open up Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. Select your System Drive and click Verify Disk. Then Repair Permissions when that's done--assuming it passes.

Do you have MacJanitor? I can talk you through the Periodic Tools, but it's much easier to just let MacJanitor do it all for you.

All that and throw out or move about 10G worth of stuff. Don't forget to empty out the trash can. Finder > Empty Trash.

How big is the system drive?

If Audacity crashed with an SBBOD, then there is no show to recover. Audacity couldn't write all the capture files.

Koz