problems recording audio (live stream)

[danthebangerboy]

This is a strange one! I can listen to the live stream ok, and the sound quality is perfect. So, i let the whole stream (1 track) play through once so its buffered ok. Audacity records the track and the sound quality is spot on, but there are massive chunks of music missing. There arent any silent gaps or anything like that, just missing audio. The track itself is about 3 minutes long but my recording comes out just over a minute long. Its almost as if the recording had been paused and resumed several times.

This 1st link is to my freshly made (short!)recording. short track.mp3

This 2nd link is the full track that i already have to indicate how long the track should in fact be, but the sound quality is not that good. full length track.mp3

[steve]

In "Edit > Preferences > Quality", set the defaults to 16 bit, 44100 Hz and see if that is any better.
Also read this to make sure that you are not falling foul of one of these common problems:
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... ement_Tips

[danthebangerboy]

I changed it to 16 bit and 44100mhz but it is still doing the same thing. I have also given the pc a good spring clean, virus scan, defrag, adware scan etc.. and it has made a very tiny difference but hardly noticeable really. The only thing i have noticed is that when i am on the web page with the music playing, Internet explorer is using about 95% of my CPU power. Could this mean that IE is lagging my pc so much that audacity does not have enough resources to do a smooth recording?
I have tried running that page in firefox 3 but the music never starts, it just buffers forever, the same happens if i try with google chrome (my usual browser) I have tried putting the priority settings of IE to low in the processes menu with no change.

[steve]

The only thing i have noticed is that when i am on the web page with the music playing, Internet explorer is using about 95% of my CPU power

Well that looks like the problem, but I don't know what you should do about it. Audacity will have a real problem trying to run with only 5% of your CPU.

[danthebangerboy]

Well i'm not sure what i did exactly, but i tried recording it for the umpteenth time and it worked perfectly! Thanks for your advice steve, especially with the bitrate and mhz settings. i was wondering why regular songh length tracks were taking about 10 minutes to save, i was on 32 bit stereo and 96000mhz before which would explain iT!

[steve]

Well i'm not sure what i did exactly, but i tried recording it for the umpteenth time and it worked perfectly!

Perhaps Windows update was busy using up your cpu, or perhaps a virus scan, or something like that. You need to watch out for background processes hogging your computer resources while you are recording.

[danthebangerboy]

Possibly, although according to the processes screen the only thing using power was iexplore. It did go down to about 80% when i finally managed a recording for some reason. I can't seem to understand why i can't play the embedded music in anyother browser though as i have got firefox and google chrome, and it will not play in either of those which made me resort to internet explorer.