I can only record 6 seconds or less of vinyl

[Garynewman66]

Hi Gale,

it's 32 bit and i'm on service pack three. the makie usb driver was already installed.

I'm still having problems though.

Cheers,

Gary

[Garynewman66]

I've got it working now. However the resultant mp3's have skips in them as the recording struggles to keep up. The effect is reuced with a lower sample rate but the net sound quality is noticibly reduced compared to 48k.

Is there ways round this new problem beyond buying a new faster computer.

cheers,

Gary

[Gale Andrews]

I've got it working now. However the resultant mp3's have skips in them as the recording struggles to keep up. The effect is reuced with a lower sample rate but the net sound quality is noticibly reduced compared to 48k.

Is there ways round this new problem beyond buying a new faster computer.

You can try some of the tips here like turning off virus scanning on the Audacity temporary folder or minimising the Audacity window. You really shouldn't need to reduce sample rate, but when you say you changed the sample format, have you tried Default Sample Format in Quality Preferences at 16-bit?

Is the rationale for the Onyx that the computer lacks a line-in? I'm guessing this could be a USB problem. Have you got an external mic you can plug into the machine to record with, or an internal mic? If a mic recording direct into the computer doesn't have the problem then that's a lot of possibilities eliminated.



Gale

[Garynewman66]

Hi Gale,

Yeah the logic was that i didn't have a line in to the computer so i brought the onyx as it had a built in sound card+usb output+good quality preamps. Tried setting format to 24bit + followed applicable advice in the link you sent me. Have had an improvement - decent sound quality and no skipping during the recording. However the recording still crashes quite often and i have to restart - an issue which keeps getting worse.

Cheers,

Gary

[Gale Andrews]

Yeah the logic was that i didn't have a line in to the computer so i brought the onyx as it had a built in sound card+usb output+good quality preamps. Tried setting format to 24bit + followed applicable advice in the link you sent me. Have had an improvement - decent sound quality and no skipping during the recording.

I would tend to use 16-bit. Audacity will only actually record 16-bit on Windows (larger sample formats are just padded out) so there isn't a huge advantage in 32-bit float and almost none (I would say) in 24-bit in those circumstances.

However the recording still crashes quite often and i have to restart - an issue which keeps getting worse.

Do these crashes occur just a few seconds after starting to record or after longer? Have you got "Audio Cache" enabled in the Directories Preferences? In principle that might help with skips (if you still had them) because it records to RAM rather than the drive and writing to RAM is faster than writing to a drive. However Audio Cache can cause crashes purely because it uses up RAM. It also means the recording cannot be recovered if it crashes in progress. Audio Cache would be very likely to crash a machine that was having issues if it was kept enabled after recording was finished.

Also are these crashes just in Audacity or does the whole computer crash? If the whole computer, you can probably find out what exactly is causing the problem from the memory dump. If only Audacity is crashing, you could search for "appcompat.txt" on the computer but that only rarely has anything useful.



Gale

[Garynewman66]

Hi Gale,

I switched to 16bit and couldn't notice any differences in quality so stuck with that and the problem lessened. However it has come back even with 16 bit. I did switch to audio cache to deal with skipping in the end mp3 so i shall try switching it off again. Have set the latency to 1000ms as well - given that i don't need to hear the recording output as i go along would increasing this number provide any benefit. When it crashes it's just the recording - audacity still works i just have to npress stop and delete the audio track.

will keep playing.

Had a really good run last night but today is a pain.

cheers,

Oscar

[Garynewman66]

It's worse with audio cache off. Really not playing ball with me at the moment. Would switching to audacity 1.2. be any better?

[Gale Andrews]

Oscar,

1000 ms audio to buffer is quite high. I guess you could increase it but I'm beginning to doubt it would help.

A "crash" explicitly means a program exits of its own accord. A "hang" means the program ceases to respond so that the user has to force quit it. You are not having a crash, from what you say. All that is happening is that the recording cursor stops going forward and just "hovers" or trembles (this is what you described in your first post).

I still think the USB transmission could be the problem, but have you actually rebooted in a while? That's the standard answer for the recording cursor "hovering".

If reboot doesn't help I still think you should try recording using SoundMax, even if only recording from the internal mic. If that records fine, then USB is the problem. Are there any issues (yellow flags) with the Universal Serial Bus Controllers if you look in Windows Device Manager?

Are you sure you can't switch the SoundMax mic input to line level? Some laptops support this - you will need to look at the laptop manual. If the mic port can switch to line, you can run a cable from the mixer to the SoundMax input then not use the USB input.



Gale