Audacity HANGS in XP after 1 successful export session

[steve]

OK... I get it .. I'll go away ...

No no no, that's not what I meant at all. Many apologies if that's the way it came over.

koz and myself have no ownership of this product - it is your product just as much as it is mine.
We are all trying to get Audacity to work with your system. What I was saying was that in troubleshooting a problem it is necessary to eliminate possible causes until the root of the problem becomes evident.

The fact that it works fine with Pyro tells us that it is not a hardware problem (one possible cause eliminated).

70 GB free drive space - you could be running into problems here if you are editing multiple albums one after the other without closing Audacity in between each project. 1 album recorded at 48kHz 32 bit is around 2 GB. Normalize it and because of the "undo" data it's up to 4 gig. Run the noise removal and click removal and Eq it and you are up to about 10 gig. Repeat for another 2 albums and you are up to 30 gig - nearly half of your available space. Also Windows machines should always have at least 10% disk space free. 70 GB sounds like a lot, but if you are editing multiple albums you can rapidly use it up. This is one reason why it is important to close Audacity between projects. (one more possible cause eliminated).

There could be a software conflict in your system.

This is sounding increasingly likely - the way to determine this is, as MDOC has said, by a process of elimination.

Does Audacity work with the USB turntable disconnected?

If it does, then at least you have a viable workaround as a last resort - Record in Pyro, edit in Audacity. Not an ideal solution, and it would certainly be better if we could resolve the issues.

Did I mention that on my XP machine, Audacity 1.3.4 was the most stable (no crashes ever). This version is still available for download.

[seglea]

Is anyone still listening on this thread? Only I have what I suspect is the same problem, or a related one. I recently bought a usb turntable, downloaded audacity 1.2.6, and set about transcribing a pile of old vinyl to .mp3. But every so often, I get a complete freeze-up - nothing will respond to anything, not even a ctrl-alt-del. Unlike Cody, I can't even make other programs work before I click in the Audacity window - it is all stuck. My machine is fairly busy, wired to a home network, and usually running an email client, a browser, Norton anti-virus, Google desktop, Windows media player, and maybe a compiler or database, or backing up to my office via a vpn at the same time. But these things come and go, and never seem to cause a hangup on their own - the constant factor is audacity. My wife, who uses the same machine and much the set of programs as I do, but never uses audacity, has never had it happen, even though the usb turntable is sitting there connected to power and to the machine all the time. So... are there any more clues about what may be going on here? And in particular, would it be sensible for me to migrate to 1.3.x? I'd be grateful for opinions.
I'm running XP Home SP3 with 2.5Gb of memory and 32Gb freespace on my local hard drive

[steve]

in particular, would it be sensible for me to migrate to 1.3.x?

Yes definitely. The current version is 1.3.7, but keep checking the Audacity website as 1.3.8 is due out soon (or sign up at the bottom of this page for notification of the next release http://audacityteam.org/)

I'm running XP Home SP3 with 2.5Gb of memory and 32Gb freespace on my local hard drive

Depending on what you are doing, 32GB may not be a huge amount of free space. If you are working on complete albums (around 1 hour recordings) the data for the recording if using 32bit samples will be around 1.5GB. After a bit of processing the undo files can quickly increase to many times this size. Normalize it and you have gone up to 3GB, Eq it and you are at 4.5GB, do something else and you could be up to 6GB - before long you could be using half of that free space. Windows always likes to have a good amount of free space and it is generally recommended that you always have a minimum of 10% of the drive space free. This is also assuming that the drive space is defragmented and error free.

There is a nasty problem that sometimes happens with USB - I used to get this problem when I had a USB broadband modem - If there is an interruption to the data stream, the CPU can be left waiting for data from the USB, but the USB does not know this and so does nothing to rectify the situation. The result is that XP hangs. I've only ever noticed this problem on Windows XP, so I don't know if it can happen with other OS's, but it seems that it is also dependent on the board architecture (in my case the problem only happened on one machine but not another, although both machines were set up identically and ran perfectly in all other respects).

Generally on Desktop computers, the USB connectors on the back tend to be more reliable than those on the front (if applicable).

[seglea]

Thanks for that, very helpful. I can certainly try switching to one of the rear USBs, and updating to the beta.
As regards disk space, the disk is fairly recently defragged, but it's only an 80Gb unit so I'm not going to get very much more space even if I go hunting for stuff that isn't earning its keep. There's some evidence for your disk space hypothesis, in that I have a couple of times had the problem when dealing with a very big album (3 LPs), and again when I had left an album writing into Audacity and gone off to do something else, so it was sitting there recording half an hour of nothing - which I expect occupies no less temporary disk space than half an hour of music. I have a NAS (Buffalo Link Station) on a Gb network with the machine, and that has bags of space - I'm thinking of trying shifting the Audacity temp files to that, but would you expect it to be able to keep up? It is pretty quick, but you do notice that it's not as fast as the internal HD.

[steve]

so it was sitting there recording half an hour of nothing - which I expect occupies no less temporary disk space than half an hour of music.

Surprisingly it takes exactly the same temporary disk space.

I'm thinking of trying shifting the Audacity temp files to that,

Not a good idea, particularly for recording. It's a good idea to Save your projects and Export your audio files to the external drive, but for recording you definitely want to be on the local drive. Just keep an eye on how much free space you have and it should not be a problem.

Let us know how you get on with 1.3.7