Audacity 1.3.7: Sound stuttering after long recording

[leChef1001]

<<<293 GB.>>>
We like two numbers when you describe the drive. Is this like a 750GB total drive or higher? I found on several machines that having massive hard drives in a machine slows things down very significantly.
Video and some audio machines arrange RAID systems for speed rather than just raw storage capacity.
The best combination, other than hard wired RAID is a 40-80 GB system or main drive C:, with a second data drive D: for the show.

Actually my Windows is on a different disk than my data drive with 293 GB free. The data drive is the first partition of a raid0 disk.
It's definitely not a problem with the drive speed.
It's either a problem with the sound driver or with Audacity.
Again, we are only talking of writing some wave files. Even my old Pentium 200 MMX could do this without problems.

Regards,
Fred

[waxcylinder]

Actually my Windows is on a different disk than my data drive with 293 GB free. The data drive is the first partition of a raid0 disk.

This then may well be the problem - is your Raid disc an external USB or Firewire disc?

It is not normally recommended to use Audacity to record onto an external drive as this can give write speed problems. Better to record onto your hard drive and probably to edit there too - and then use the external disc as the archive for the edited production files.

WC

[leChef1001]

This then may well be the problem - is your Raid disc an external USB or Firewire disc?

It's not an external dive. These are SATA Drives connected to the onboard raid (ICH9R) controller.

[steve]

I think that we may have got somewhat distracted from the original question.

Although "short recording > OK / long recording > stuttering" is usually indicative of fragmentation or other drive access speed issues, we seem to have pretty well eliminated such possibilities.

Looking back to the first page of this topic....

My system:
Vista x64 SP1,
8 GB Ram,
lots of free disc space,
Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Music set to audio creation mode,
latest drivers installed

Sounds like a good set-up, and with further details supplied later, it should work brilliantly with Audacity. The one doubt that I have about this set-up is that there were known incompatibility problems with the X-Fi series and 64 bit Vista with 4GB or more RAM up until recently (if I recall correctly ~ 2008). The latest driver updates were supposed to fix these issues. (I wonder how much these updated drivers have been tested on recordings in excess of 6:45:47.5 duration).

Aftrer trimming the project to the point where the stuttering starts, the project folder contains 8192 file with an overall size of 8,12 GB.
The number 8192 doesn't seem random to me....

I get the impression that you have tested this quite thoroughly, and no, 8192 does not seem "random" (128 x 64, or 2^13).

I don't know how practical this is for your situation, but I think that what I would be trying at this stage is temporarily replace the X-Fi sound card with some other sound card, purely for testing purposes. If the issue than goes away, then that would confirm a problem with the sound card (almost certainly the sound card driver). My guess at this stage is that the sound card driver (under Vista 64) is the problem, and since the X-Fi Extreme music is now discontinued, the chances of a fix from Creative are probably not that good. However, OEM versions of this sound card are still widely available, so even if this does prove to be the problem, there is at least a chance that alternative drivers may be available.

As indicated earlier in this thread, there is still an issue that an 8GB file can not be Exported as a single WAV file (because the format does not support greater than 4GB), so I would probably not be making such long recordings anyway, though that does of course depend on what you are using Audacity for.

Sorry for the absence of answers - perhaps someone else has some other ideas?