Audacity Forum

Hello there, made an account just to post this as it is quite urgent to me...

I've used Audacity for a long time - in fact it must be 4 years now, is that possible? - and I've very rarely encountered any problems. However, upon recording a song last night (which I usually do, then export to .mp3 and bam: it's all good), my laptop froze for a very long time then just shut down.

Now, I can boot up the laptop and I can even open Audacity, but if I try to listen to the song, it freezes. If I try to export it to .mp3, it takes a ridiculous amount of time - around 25 minutes, when it's usually exported in under a minute - and doesn't actually convert at all. My screen simply flashes blue then shuts down in the blink of an eye.

Fortunately, this DOES seem to indicate that the session is saved and I don't have to record it all again (I'd layered it so much, so precisely, and it took me 10 hours straight playing that if I'd lost it, I'd likely lose the will to live), but it's just teasing me, sitting there completed and ready, but I can't listen to it or do anything with it.

Some hints as to the problem:
- One of the times it froze, it popped up telling me something about an ATI driver, which I didn't have much time to catch,
- Another time it told me that "windows has encountered a critical error and will restart in one minute" in a very unofficial-looking warning box. It did restart.
- Windows explorer often crashes and tells me this, and the taskbar at the bottom disappears from sight.

Hopefully I've given enough information to find a solution to my problem, this really is irking me somewhat. That's saying the least.
Thank you so much in advance!

Absolutely nothing to do with Audacity, which cannot cause Windows to shut down.

It sounds to me everything to do with the ATI drivers message you see.

See here for some ideas on how you can debug the issue further:
http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 10#p147793

You can update or rollback the display adapter drivers in Windows Device Manager.

Also has this issue occurred since updating to Windows 7 Service Pack 1? You might want to look at:
http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 87#p148272

Are you actually using Audacity 1.2? It sounds from your description if Audacity is showing you "Automatic Crash Recovery" when you restart it, but only 1.3 can do that. Or are you re-importing a WAV or MP3 or reopening a saved project?

1.3.13 Beta is strongly recommended for Windows 7, but if you are already using 1.3.13 and exit Audacity cleanly, make sure you have either already exported (to WAV if you want to keep lossless quality) or saved the recovered project. If you exit without saving changes, and there was no project before, then everything will be gone.



Gale

Thank you very much for the swift reply!

I was using 1.3.12 and recorded everything in that, and thought that may be the problem so I've downloaded 1.3.13 also. I'm going to look into updating the ATI driver, but why would that affect exporting my session from Audacity?

I'll try to export into .wav, see if that makes any difference!

Katsuo Barufo wrote: I'm going to look into updating the ATI driver, but why would that affect exporting my session from Audacity?

Because Audacity works the video drivers and the CPU quite hard to show you the waveform, and unlike other programs uses the audio device too. If the problem only occurs when you use Audacity it could easily be an interaction between the video drivers and the sound drivers.

Katsuo Barufo wrote:
I'll try to export into .wav, see if that makes any difference!

I don't expect it to stop the freeze, but I was suggesting when the computer is stable enough to let you export, you should do that when you restart Audacity and get the Automatic Crash Recovery Dialogue.



Gale