Brrrrrp...Stutter - 1.3.9 sound on sound rec'ding

[JaZZedUp]

I'm a multi-instrument / vocal musician and am laying down track overlays using a clicktrack.
So far, I put down
1 - click,
2- guitar 1,
3- guitar 2, (drop in where playing errors on track2 happened)
4- bass 1,
5- guitar solo
6- bass 2 ( drop in where playing errors on track4 happened)

Now when attempting to drop in track 7 (drums), about half way through the track, the playback burps, stutters and the recording from that point on is out of sync. Since I expect to add vocal 1, harmony vocal 1 and perhaps harmony vocal 2, I would like to solve this while keeping addressability of the individual tracks.

I've tried muting several tracks, disabling the auto scroll navigation and up arrowing the tracks to tiny preview mode but can't seem to get this issue to go away. I didn't notice this behavior until track 6 and 7. If it is related to compute power on input, is there a way to either combine tracks or hide / export them temporarily ? I have found that I've had to fudge the placement of tracks left or right after they have been captured to realign with the click, so I'm somewhat concerned about having them align again if I have to export them.

Should it matter, these are all mono tracks @ 44100.

[Irish]

I'm taking a bit of a guess here, but it looks like you might have a problem with disk space. You need at least 10% free at all times.

Even if that is not the cause, I would suggest you export each track separately as a WAV before doing anything else. At least then you have a backup if the worst happens and Audacity crashes.

If disk space is an issue, then after you export the WAVs, delete the project file and data folder, along with anything else you can, to create space. Then open Audacity and import all the WAVs.

I don't think you should have any need to do anything to line up the tracks when you re-import them. The reason you had to do it when you recorded is that there is a slight time lag between Audacity getting the input and writing the data to the disk. When you export as WAV and re-import, they will come back exactly as they were.

Audacity uses a lot of disk space (think in terms of 10 MB per minute per track, and double it for each time you used Undo. That's not exact but it gives you an idea).

PO'L

[JaZZedUp]

I would suggest you export each track separately as a WAV before doing anything else

I must be missing something, because if I select the track I only get the length of it with no offset info attached. I "export selection" as .wav and then when reimporting, it comes in as Zero, but may not belong there. I tried it with the click track and the drum track and they don't align properly in a new project unless you use the double arrow to move them around again.

Oddly enough the click track came back in with beat 1 highlighted in red on each measure so it somehow knew something special about this data that it didn't know before !?

[Irish]

... if I select the track I only get the length of it with no offset info attached.

I'm not clear on what you mean. If you select the track by clicking on the control box to the left of the track, and export, you get the whole track from zero to the end. There shouldn't be a question of offset.

When you import the WAV again, you get exactly the same track.
(to prove it, generate a tone, say 5 seconds long. Zoom in until you can see the individual samples. Delete the first 15 samples. Export and Import. The track starts at the same point on the wave as the one you exported, with 15 samples missing).

when reimporting, it comes in as Zero, but may not belong there

Again I'm not clear on what you mean. Are you selecting the whole track to export, or do you mean the bit you selected to export didn't start at zero?

But to go back to the original problem, how much free space have you on your hard disk, and how much space in total?
Are you using an external hard drive? That's not good, because it may be too slow to keep up with the data coming from Audacity.
You should be using the computer's internal hard drive.

PO'L