Audacity wouldn't record

[hedera]

I record the rehearsals of my chorus on a Vista Home Premium laptop using the Audacity beta; I have both 1.3.6 and 1.3.4 installed (in separate directories). My recording hardware is a Presonus Firepod plugged into my firewire port; I record on channels 3 and 4 using Samson C03 condenser mics.

Last night I couldn't get Audacity 1.3.6 to begin recording at the beginning of the rehearsal; even rebooting the laptop and replugging the firewire cables didn't help. I recently changed my internet security suite from McAfee to ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite v.8, and this was the first recording session since then, so I suspected that ZA was blocking something. Since I usually record with the wireless card turned off, I shut ZoneAlarm down, running with no firewall, and was then able to record, but only in Audacity 1.3.4. Because I was hassled (rehearsal was starting!) I'm not absolutely sure that I couldn't have gotten 1.3.6 to work by turning ZA off.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Are there known issues with Audacity beta and ZoneAlarm v.8? I can't understand why my firewall should block recording on the firewire port, but I'm not very experienced with this equipment. Any suggestions or explanations would be very welcome.

[kozikowski]

The video people have this problem all the time. If you have a particularly vicious protection suite, it tries to monitor everything written to the hard drive or any file that changes. This usually kills live production, video or audio.

Koz

[hedera]

Somehow I was afraid you were going to say that; it's nice to know it isn't just me. I'll take this up on the ZA forum, thanks for the advice.

[waxcylinder]

hedera,

some AV software lets you tell it to trust/ignore certain filetypes (I don't know the ones you're usig - so check your manual).

If you can do this then set it to ignore all .aup and all .au files - then you should be able to keep the AV running while you work ok on Audacity.

WC

[hedera]

Thanks, waxycylinder, I've set the AV in ZoneAlarm to ignore .au and .aup files in the directory where I stash them, we'll see if that works.

[hedera]

Turns out it wasn't the AV. It was the security suite itself. For any other ZoneAlarm users out there, Audacity has to have the "super trusted" setting (3 bars) in the Zone Alarm Program Control section, under the Programs list. With that, I could record. Just to make sure, I had removed the AV exceptions I put in earlier.