Audacity Forum

I've been using Audacity1.3 for a year with no problems (recording via an MAudio Ultra on an XP machine) and made over 70 podcasts. I just bought a new Windows 7 laptop with Dual Core i5 chip, 8gbRAM, 250GB hard drive. It's completely clean with virtually all its hard drive space available. I've downloaded latest drivers etc. Just tried to edit a recording on this new machine and it's crashed and lost the files three times in an hour. The recording was made on the XP machine and transferred over to the new one - are there known issues editing an XP 'saved' project on a W7 machine or could there be something else going on? ANY help would be gratefully recieved. Thanks

Charlie

charliem wrote: Just tried to edit a recording on this new machine and it's crashed

What crashed, Audacity or the entire system? If the computer crashed then it is almost certainly a driver problem.

Apologies, I didn't make that clear did I? I posted after reading other threads re crashing looking for answers so was in 'Audacity is crashing 'mode. My 'Audacity crash' is exactly as described in the other 'crash' threads. Audacity crashes, goes into the whited-out screen and the three usual 'close' options, I close it, when I re-launch the programme starts up with loads of files missing. I've not seen any questions asking about recording on XP (32bit) and trying to edit on W7 (64 bit) - which I was trying to do. Hopefully when I configure the new laptop properly I'll record and edit on the same machine, but I have a pile of old podcasts I want to put new intros on and am wondering now whether that's possible to do as they were all recorded using XP. Is there a known issue with what I'm trying to do - and if not what else might I be doing wrong? Thankyou.

When is the crash happening - when you launch Audacity (so that you never get to open the project) or at some point in editing the project? If the latter, does something specific trigger the crash like a specific edit, or playing a track?

Have you saved this project in 1.3 yet? If so, a 1.2 version of Audacity won't be able to open it any longer.

Are you missing audio in the tracks that should be there?

Assuming the crash is in the project then if the XP machine was running Audacity 1.2, there is at least one potential incompatibility between 1.2 and 1.3 projects that has become known to us. What happens is that the little .au data files that Audacity writes in the project _data folder are longer than the length the .aup file says they should be. 1.2 may do this quite often, but 1.3 can occasionally do it too. Either way, the current 1.3.13 Beta and Betas before will simply delete the "overlong" .au files without warning.

The current 1.3.14 alpha Nightly Builds do not delete these overlong .au files but call them "orphans" and make them unavailable to the project. This means there is no automated way to recover them in the correct sequence. This may or may not be the final solution to handling projects that have this problem; I would like to do better than that if it's possible.

1.3 has some other problems too re-opening projects - the problems are rare but proving hard to track down. The best advice if you open a project in 1.3 (even if it seems OK) is to export a WAV file (or separate WAV's per track if it is a multi-track project) before closing the project. For projects created in 1.2, make a copy of the .aup file and the project _data folder before opening the project in 1.3.

To get some idea if the project is the problem, can you please attach the .aup file. If Audacity stays open long enough after opening the project, please click Help > Show Log then click Log > Save... when in the log and attach the log. To attach these, please use "Upload attachment" underneath where you post.



Gale

Thanks very much for your help - I can see how busy you must be! The 'crashes' or 'freezes' are occurring during editing (loading the project is fine). I can't say what is specifically causing it - but it's after I've used an edit tool and the work is being rendered. I've been using Audacity v1.3 on the XP machine for about six months and recording and editing on that is absolutely fine - never had a problem: it's when I save the whole project as an .aup project, copy onto a USB, move it onto the Windows 7 machine (which has the same version of Audacity on it as on the XP one) and try editing it there. The original recordings I'm saving on the XP machine (which is far lower specced, and has a fraction of the memory and power of the new laptop) are continuous stereo-channel Skyped conversations of about an hour: as I said, edits are fine on the XP machine, but are not workable with when I move them over to the W7 one. What's happening is that I'm losing huge chunks of audio in both channels, so that just a very short section is being left on the original timeline and everything else is gone and unrecoverable.
Could it be that there is a difference in the way the two Windows OS are saving the files that won't allow transfer between the computers - ie, if I want to work on older .aup projects recorded on the XP machine originally I will just have to wok on them on that machine. Is there a known issue?
Thanks again.

I don't think that this is related to your problem, but one thing that you should always do before transferring a project from one machine to another is to check dependencies (File menu > Check Dependencies).

Thanks for the reply, charliem. I hope the following isn't too long and too many questions thrown at you.

There is definitely no known issue in principle about moving projects created in 1.3.x versions between different versions of Windows, or even between different platforms such as Windows to Mac.

There may be practical problems like Steve mentioned if WAV or AIFF files imported into the project were not copied into it, or issues transferring projects between platforms if the project contains Unicode characters and the platforms handle encoding of those characters differently.

However, saving a project in one version of Audacity and opening it in another version is much more important, which is why I wanted to be clear these projects were originally created in a 1.3 version rather than in 1.2.

A good "acid test" would be if you open one of the projects that crashes on Win 7 in Win XP (running 1.3.13) and follow the same edits you made in Win 7. I'm guessing it would crash on XP too, but I would still like to see the .aup file for at least one of the projects that crashes in 1.3.13/Win 7 and the log entries at the time you open it, if you could oblige. Otherwise, we're just guessing. If you have the "overlong .au files" problem, it's quite possible that playing or editing the project will cause a crash. If the .aup looks "legal", there is some other problem.

How long are the Audacity tracks in the projects you are opening and how many tracks are there? Are the intros you are adding being recorded, or are you importing a file? Are some tracks in one format (for example, they say "32-bit float" above the Mute/Solo buttons), but other tracks are in another bit format? Are you pasting from one track to another?

charliem wrote:What's happening is that I'm losing huge chunks of audio in both channels, so that just a very short section is being left on the original timeline and everything else is gone and unrecoverable.

Can I take it all the audio is apparently present when you first open the project on Win 7?

And when you restart Audacity after the crash and receive the Automatic Crash Recovery dialogue, can you see then that audio is missing? If we can get the Log when opening the project we can at least get a little idea about what specific error is being flagged for the loss.

Additionally it may be very helpful if you can bring across another copy of that same project to the Win 7 machine. Drag it off the USB drive to a different folder so you don't need to rename the project, then open it and save a log for us before you start editing the project. Then we can compare the two logs.

Thanks for your help.



Gale