"Not Responding" and very long delays.

[Emerogork]

It works like a charm. I even pushed it out to 20 hours
Copy/paste, Cut paste. move to the beginning middle or end. All in a fraction of a second each.
My settings show Mono, 4410HZ, 32-bit float: The same as when I an recording radio.

Very interesting,...

[Emerogork]

FYI: 8 gig memory and nothing else running on the system when I am recording. 64bit operating system x64-based processor.

[kozikowski]

It's nice you're running 64 bit, but Audacity (as far as I know) is 32-bit.

So it seems to be a time-related failure.

My only experience that maps to this problem is a memory checker. There is a program that loads into the machine in place of the regular OS (It used to be on a floppy) and once started, it pushes very precise, specific patterns of ones and zeros (with funny names) to whatever memory it's not standing on. It is very strongly recommended that the test be run multiple passes, such as start it when you go to bed.

Windows MemCheck failed at 04:35, pass 20, Leaping Frog pattern at location 14, memory stick 3.

Running the tester only once is nearly a complete waste of time. This example failed some five hours after I started it.

I have no idea what could cause a very long project to be damaged in a way that just makes it sluggish rather than crash. Possibly the machine is hot right after the recording and is in heavy error correction and recovery. When you're doing production like that, the hard drive has no chance to spin down and cool off. I don't remember the number, but something like every ten seconds, Audacity writes to the drive. In your case, forever.

I'm completely dreaming up possibilities. I have no idea what's wrong with the machine.

Koz

[Emerogork]

And it does it with such incredible consistency.
Short recordings work perfectly without delays.

When I play them, I tend to delete that which I have listened and save the balance. It can get down to 3 hours and I save it but still takes 3 minutes to load, 2 minuted to get to the end of the track when I hit <end>. It looks as if what ever is affecting the track is saved with even a fragment of that track.

It is interesting that 20 hours of pink noise ran without any indication of any problem. I will be trying the next recording with lower resolution to see if it makes any difference. Since I will be recording in real time I willl not see the results until late tomorrow night.

[Gale Andrews]

I record very long audio tracks, some times up to 15 hours or so, and that in itself maybe the problem but I wonder if there is a fix or work around.

All it takes is a single click, for any reason, and I get "Not Responding" at the top of the screen and I have no access to the program for 5 - 6 minutes. If I click a second time the screen goes grey. [...]
There is no editing, just record and play.

If you had been editing, I would have suggested Tracks > Mix and Render.

There are many ways Audacity is slow with long projects, but I am a bit surprised by just click causing an issue, because even in 2.1.1 that click action no longer writes any data - in older 2.x.x versions the click would scan the data and write an "autosave" file so as to save the cursor position.

Does 2.1.3-alpha help? Try the top build http://gaclrecords.org.uk/win-nightly/.


Gale

[kozikowski]

I willl not see the results until late tomorrow night.

I know this is just the most fun you can possibly have, but it would be interesting to narrow it down. Such as: It does this time delay thing whenever the live recording goes over eleven hours, seventeen minutes and forty-five seconds. That's clearly a software trigger happening in the wrong place. If you can only determine the failure to the nearest one or two hours, I'm going with a heat/hardware problem.

The computer people have a fancy-pants name for this (successive approximation?), but do a test recording half as long. Then divide the result in half again. For example, if 6 hours doesn't fail, make one half-way between 6 and 15. If it does fail, go for 3 hours.

Koz

[Emerogork]

Taking a week to open a 15-hour Project fresh is normal."

Wow, I certainly hope this is not the case.

[roadsterUK]

What setting are you using under preferences import/export copy or read from original location? I have just done some tests with several very large files (greater than 4 GBytes) opened simultaneously and I can't get audacity (32 bit version) to consume more than about 95 MBytes of memory so it does imply a lot of disk use. If you have plenty of memory to spare you could try using a virtual disk (ram disk) for audacity temporary files and even to test reopening a project that is copied to a virtual disk. There are a few free options for ram drives for example :- http://www.radeonramdisk.com/index.php.
If this does give a significant improvement and you need greater temporary file space you could consider using a sata solid state drive for temporary file space.

[Emerogork]

Wow, after all these years of fighting with this problem. It is cured and it was so simple.

Since I no longer trust MS and backups, I designed my own technique. Everything I do saves to a network drive. I backup (rather copy) that information to another drive as a back up. As a result, the Audacity files were going there too. When I saved them to the C drive, everything cleared instantly.

I am sure that others are making network asving work and there may well be a fluke in my network but the problem seems to be gone and I don't care.....
Trying to get that timer delay-start to work is not so much of an issue but it would be interesting to see why it never worked for me.

Mischief Managed.

[waxcylinder]

Trying to get that timer delay-start to work is not so much of an issue but it would be interesting to see why it never worked for me.

Emerogork,

I've been discussing this bug with one of the developers, he still doesn't understand why this happens, but he has his suspicions and has an idea for a change to the code that may make this problem go away.

If he develops such a "fix" would you be prepared to test it for us - as you are one of the two users for whom this seems to happen consistently?

Peter.