Audacity Forum

Greetings All:

New to Audacity.
Cannot find how to direct recording data to external hard disk through USB connection to iBook. Would like more continous recording time than internal disk has room.
Thank you for any assistance.

Robert

Recording direct to an external device is not recommended as the device needs to be able to sustain a continuous high transfer rate without any interruption. It is generally better to move other stuff off the internal hard drive so that you have sufficient space on the internal drive.

That's not to say that it won't work - just that it's not recommended and may cause problems. If you want to try it, just Save the empty project to the external drive before you start recording. Once the Audacity Project has been saved to disk all audio data will then be written into the project _data file rather than using the temporary folder.

If you've not already done so, I'd highly recommend that you read this section of the manual: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Audacity_Projects

Use FireWire. FireWire was developed to do jobs like this. It's fast and it's fully bidirectional, unlike USB. I'm trying to remember whether or not my iBook had FireWire. I don't remember. USB isn't good because it only sends data one direction at a time and has to periodically wait while it turns the channel around. Waiting is deadly in video or audio.

Koz