Crash recovery failure 1.3.8

[heseltine]

Hello,

Audacity crashes at about 13 hours 20 minutes or so of recording (it went this long by accident). The project is initially saved before recording begins. The project rate is set to 9600 hz. All other settings are at default.

The first time this happened I restarted Audacity, it recovered the project, I saved the recovered project. And I could export parts to a wav file. However, I closed the project and when I reopened it, it froze in the 'testing' process, showing 7 seconds of test had elapsed, but 1.5 hours remained. There was no progress. Audacity could not be shut down without a hard boot.

The second time Audacity crashed Iagain recovered it, but I deleted that portion of the recording I did not want, then saved it, but again when I restarted the project it froze at the initial testing stage. (again, the initial crash happened at 13h20m, and the recording went this long by accident) (And, yes I understand that the older version of Audacity had a problem where it could no record more than 13 hours, but I understood this problem was fixed). I thought that by chopping the recording to well below 13 hours all would be okay.

My machine is a P4 3.23mhz with 2 gb of Ram.

Any help would be appreciated.

Mark

[steve]

That's a pretty big project - around 20GB of data in 20000 little file fragments, and that's before any editing. As soon as you do any editing Audacity will start making duplicates for the Undo History.
The largest file size for a WAV file is 4GB (this is the limit for the WAV format).

The current version of Audacity has no limit for the size of the recording, but with projects this big the operating system can start running into trouble. The only successful reports that I've seen for handling projects this big have been using 64bit operating systems, with oodles of Gigs of free drive space on the primary drive.

With very big projects, everything will be extremely slow - 2GB of RAM is a spit in the ocean, and as soon as the computer starts shuffling memory between RAM and disk the computer will grind to an apparent halt (though it may recover if left long enough - but that may take many hours).

If you manage to get the project open again - start Exporting in 1GB WAV files. Keep a close eye on available disk space and start with the most important bits.
Good Luck.

[heseltine]

Thanks, Steve,

I've been successful, so far, at recording upwards of 5 hours without complaint. I then export the lot to WAV in 1.5 hour segments (anything less than 4GB files) and all goes really well.

I wish only that I were proficient with my SuSE 11.0 Linux system but so far I have not been able to record much successfully with Audacity on it.

It looks like I will have to bite the bullet and build a new system. Perhaps I can post a new question about what hardware people recommend.

Anyway, many thanks for the help.

Cheers,

Mark
(PS - is the reference to fiddle a reference to a violin or a curious nature?)

[steve]

You're welcome.
I play the violin (fiddle).