Live recording in Limbo

[votedave]

Hello, I have recently recorded 21 tracks live onto a Mac PPC G5 dual 2GHz running OSX 10.5.8. The recording worked effortlessly with the F/W interface from a Midas Venice 24F, HOWEVER, I have been trying to edit the 1h 7min recording (36Gb) and have run into continual non responsive actions from the program. I have left the machine running continually for 24hrs in the hope that this may have been a very long rendering process then forced quit. Now I have an auto recovery problem " Problems found in Auto recovery, inconsistencies found in file....
Edit process was:
1. EQ (universally applied)
2. Light Gate (tried to clean up a vocal track but it would seem that instead of applying the gate to selected track only it applied the gate to all tracks - this was the action that forced a quit).
The issue is it never recovers properly, continually showing the system busy icon and I fear greatly for this very unique and important recording.
HELP!!!!!!

[Gale Andrews]

Audacity has no effect called "Light Gate" - what is the name of the effect you were actually running? If it's a Nyquist effect it might struggle with 22 hours or so of data, depending what effect it was.

'Volumes' is a mount point for your disk drives as I understand it. Do you have a disk drive called "Data 2" and is it accessible/ working correctly/ do you still have permission to read and write to it? There are lots of "missing data blockfiles" that Audacity requires for the project that were apparently saved there. If you search in Finder for some of the .au files shown in the log like "e00b85fb.au", does it find them? You may want to make Finder show hidden files by entering the following commands in the terminal:

Code: Select all

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE 
killall Finder 

Then relaunch Finder to show the hidden files.

Hopefully Audacity is hanging because it can't access files. Otherwise keep force quitting if Auto Recovery hangs to preserve the autosave file Audacity tries to recover from. It might be an idea to attach that autosave file if you are still stuck. It should be at ~/Library/Application Support/audacity.

Did you export a backup WAV file after the recording finished that you can go back to? Or have you tried going back to the last saved state of the project by opening "/Volumes/Data 2/Yatangal.aup"? If either of those are an option I suggest you rename the extension of the "autosave" file for now to "autosav" or something else. That will stop Audacity trying to recover from it when you launch and you can try and open the WAV or the original project. You can always rename the autosave file extension back to "autosave" to have Audacity try to recover from it again.

When you get Audacity launching again, check before anything else that "Audio Cache" is not checked at Audacity > Preferences: Directories.



Gale

[votedave]

Hi Gale,

Thanks for your very detailed response.
Results are:
The program has resolved some sort of compromise on the data file and now opens and plays the recording, partially. Out of 21 tracks recorded the project now only has 8 tracks, the remaining tracks list and retain the labels but contain no content.

The search of DATA2 reveals all files are available that log claims are not accessible, the drive was extremely full, less than 30MB remaining when all this occurred. I guess that the recording time available metering on the application doesn't necessarily display an accurate account of the target disk. I have since pruned the drive of all extraneous data.

Newby stupidity, didn't make a .wav back-up, aaarrrrgh!!!!

The effect applied was Apple: AUDynamicsProcessor - Factory Preset - Light Gate.

[Gale Andrews]

"Disk space remains for recording" only displays when you are recording. It is I believe accurate except that if you record in 24-bit quality it tells you that you have the same time remaining as when you record 32-bit, so underestimates the available time.

Every edit on a whole track costs as much in disk space as if you were recording that track, due to the ability to undo and redo. You can go to View > History and discard Undo levels to free up space.

Projects can get corrupted if you run out of disk space and unfortunately we don't warn about this in 1.3.13 at the moment. Are you sure you put the files back in the correct subfolder inside the _data folder as indicated in the log?


Gale

[votedave]

Hi Gale

All files reside in the folder as indicated, no change in location has occurred just a disassociation. Any way to relate them back to the project?

TIA

Andrew

[votedave]

Hopefully Audacity is hanging because it can't access files. Otherwise keep force quitting if Auto Recovery hangs to preserve the autosave file Audacity tries to recover from. It might be an idea to attach that autosave file if you are still stuck. It should be at ~/Library/Application Support/audacity.

Gale

Hi again Gale,
Searched for the autosave file as directed, no directory for audacity exists at this location, suggestions?

[kozikowski]

Audio (and video) production needs massive amounts of drive space to work, at minimum three or four times the size of the show, plus the actual operating system -- OS-X. That's ignoring any other applications and services you have working, like your internet connection.

Once your system runs out of drive space it starts gasping for air and in the process loses and damages files. I would run Go > Utilities > Disk Utilities > Verify Disk and see if there is any obvious damage to the operating system. If there is and the machine can't heal itself, you may have to reinstall OS-X. Do you have the original install disks that came with your machine?

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

Andrew,

You should have the "audacity" folder in ~/Library/Application Support. If you generate, record or import some audio, click Effect > Equalization, choose "Save/Manage curves" then "Export...", the file save window should open there. But if you have saved the project with audio missing (as opposed to force-quit, or quit with no changes when you are warned about orphan or missing files) then the autosave file will be deleted.

If you open the project now, what does Help > Show Log say? Can you attach the log again if it has changed?

Any missing files have to be in the correct subfolder indicated in the log for Audacity to find them, not just in any random place in the _data folder.



Gale