Mix and Render freezes on audio track - 3.2.1

Hello Audacity Community.

I’m a writer in the process of recording an audio book. I am at the stage where all of my chapter tracks have been recorded and sound edited.

I have a Dell laptop with Windows 10 and I’m using Audacity 3.2.1.

All of my chapter tracks have split cuts. When I attempt to mix and render one chapter, the process freezes anywhere from 1 second to 15 seconds into the process. I have saved duplicate versions of the track and tried to mix/render and I get the same result. If I shut down and restart, the process will go for about 15 -17 seconds and freeze.

All of my tracks before chapter 3 and after have mixed and rendered with no problems, although I noticed one chapter took over a minute while the others were less than 30 seconds.

Each track was recorded the exact same way. I know I may have to re-record the entire chapter, but I’d like to avoid that if at all possible.

Thanks to anyone who may have some suggestions.

Update: When I try to mix and render my audio track, I get the following error code:

Error: Failed to load shared library ‘avformat-59.dll’(error 126:The specified module could not be found.)

That error-message is not related to the freezing problem, see … Audacity recording occasionally stops / freezes - #3 by steve

Thank you. My file is apparently corrupted. I tried to export part of it to a new file and the system froze. Time to record a new chapter.

Possibly. If you care to upload your project to a public file sharing service and post or PM me a link, I’ll take a look at it.

Thank you for the offer. I rerecorded the chapter and just saw your response. I have more rerecords to do for different issues. If I have the same problem again, I’ll work out a way to get you the file so you can take a look again.

Thanks again.

I just encountered the problem again on a file that I had previously mixed and rendered successfully. I had saved it as a new file before attempting to mix and render, and when it failed to execute, I deleted it and retried another to do it again and I was successful. The only thing that I did to the file before attempting to mix and render the first time was I added 2 seconds of dead air audio at the end and did a split cut to remove some noise.

When I attempted to listen to the file after applying effects, I lost audio via earphones even though I did not make any adjustments to playback. I will trouble shoot tomorrow.

On a related note, the system prompted me to install the new 3.2.2 version. I decided not to update because I don’t want any of my files changed or in any way corrupted.

What’s your opinion about the impact of updating to .2 on my existing finished files?

Thanks in advance.

FYI. I have rarely seen a situation where Audacity will just freeze. Generally, I have been successful with waiting it out. Sometimes it takes longer, even orders of magnitude longer, than I would expect. This can be due to the underlying database management activities that unfortunately sometimes don’t have good progress reporting. The first thing I generally do is give it an hour per project GB to do what it needs to do. Rarely, I do see a legitimate “hang”. And no, generally you will not find relevant information in the Audacity log.

Also check that you have plenty of free space available in your system, and that Windows has not converted your directory into a “compressed” drive to save space.

Is your project in the “cloud” ? This can be a recipe for disaster.

Why do you say this? When a file becomes corrupted, it is usually obvious. Please quote a relevant error message or show a screen shot.

If you are working on a book, it may be best to not change horses in midstream, unless of course it went lame.

3.2.3 is now out. Generally speaking, the riskiest releases are when the first number changes, next when the second number changes. The safest ones are when the last number changes. In this case, there are no new features and over a dozen “fixes”. The next change - 3.3.0 will contain new features and possibly hundreds of fixes - and inevitably there will be some issues.