Audacity Forum

Can anyione help I have upgrtaded to 1.3.12 because my previous version wouldn't record at all. This new version is even worse. I record live DJ mixes from a USB mixer to my PC running vista and it starts fine (the new version seems much better on the sound levels-not so much clipping) but after a length of time could be seconds could be minutes it just stops recording. Today I thopugh it was recording because it seemed looked like it was but it was just recording a second of sound at the pace of 20 seconds of realtime. It was basically buffering but would never catch up and when I stopped recording it didn't catch up it just stopped. The sound when I played back was fine no jumps or glitches but I need to record more than 19 minutes of music at atime. the last version I had used to record whatever I threw at it until it went loopy. I don't have any other programs open when i record and my CPU usage is low. Does anyone maybe know another good free audio recorder I can use instead of Audacity that doesn't have restrictions on saves.

AndyCompanyZ wrote:the last version I had used to record whatever I threw at it until it went loopy.

I wonder why it went loopy - perhaps you're running short of disk space on your C: drive? Perhaps excessive fragmentation? Perhaps Windows has updated your sound card drivers? Programs don't just "go loopy" on their own. If they suddenly start behaving differently then it's because something has changed, and my bet would be that whatever made your previous version go loopy is the same thing that is preventing Audacity 1.3.12 from working correctly.

If you want to try another good, free audio editing program, try Wavosaur - but it might be worth trying to find the cause of the recording problem before you install it.

Yes I agree that it may be something that's causing it but I haven't changed anything on my PC so I'm at a loss to find what it is. It's wierd that it does it mid recording for mo apparent reason. Does Audacity use virtual memory a lot in which case I can see why I may need more space on my C drive.

By default Audacity writes the audio data when you are recording as 32 bit uncompressed PCM. This is written (by default) as 1MB blocks to a temporary file on the C: drive. For a stereo track this produces about 20 blocks per minute of audio, so a 20 minute stereo recording will use about 400 MB of disk space. Obviously that has to be done fast enough to keep up with the audio. If for any reason it can't keep up, Audacity will fail.