network drives...

[kozikowski]

Even the grownups who can do pretty much what ever they want and rein over a killer network always do live production on a local drive. It's not dreadful, either. I have several relatively modest machines that routinely do two and three hour productions. Two hours works out to about 1.4GB at 44100, 16-bit, Stereo. If that breaks the digital bank and fills up your drives, then you are pushing your local drives way too hard and need to rethink your data storage. If you need filters and production tools, you need at least four times that storage.

Yes certainly, after capture and production, I shuttle everything off to an external drive and a backup drive to clean everything out for the next session.

We have posters who insist on recording six and eight hour events. That's not production. That's a surveillance system. Audacity can be forced to do that, but it's difficult and prone to failure.

Koz

[David Rose]

Koz,

I usually record around 3+ hours into around one gig. Then I try to edit it down to fit (hopefully) on one CD. Most of the time, we do not record interaction with the meeting speaker and breaks which amount to enough to get to near 80 minutes. We try to create CDs that will play on about any player so we are sort of stuck with wav files. By the time I save the original recording, then a copy, then a way file, and make and save a label, I'll have near 4 gigs. But decent terabyte drives are/were running around a $100, so that allows for considerable sessions at two per week.

David

[kozikowski]

Which appears to be perfectly rational data management. There is one side road you could take. Audacity supports FLAC format, which is compression without the damage...

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

...and you could save some space that way. We recommend people posting clips on the forum use that. Smaller files and no damage.

Koz