Lost Data! Pls Send Halp!

[TheDrumkid92]

Scan completed and it didn't pull up any .au files unfortunately.

Hopefully this was just a weird glitch because of how nyquist's plugin overwrites data and not a hardware issue. Who knows, maybe I'll be back on here in a couple weeks with a bum hdd. Hopefully not. Thanks for the advice, everyone!

[steve]

because of how nyquist's plugin overwrites data

Hopefully it was a weird glitch, but it's not because of how the Nyquist plug-in overwrites data, because Nyquist plug-ins don't overwrite data. That's why it is weird that the data has gone without trace.

What happens with Nyquist "Effect" plug-ins is that they read the track data from disk, perform all processing calculations in RAM and return the resulting data to Audacity. In some cases Nyquist is able to "read -> process -> return" the data in blocks, which conserves memory, but in some cases the entire selection needs to be retained in RAM until the process completes. The latter case is why some Nyquist plug-ins have problems with long selections.

As the audio data is returned from Nyquist to Audacity, Audacity writes the data to disk and updates the .AUP file so that it points to the new data. The original data is retained so that you can "Undo" the effect. On closing the project, Audacity cleans up and deletes the Undo data, retaining just the data that is required to recreate the project as it is at that time. If Audacity crashes, then it never gets round to cleaning up, which is why crashed projects usually contain "orphan" files - these are old data files from the project's "Undo history" which are no longer referenced by the AUP file.

[kozikowski]

I'll be back on here in a couple weeks with a bum hdd. Hopefully not.

Hopefully you do. If you don't, then your show has gone to the Magic Data Sucker in the Sky. It's difficult to correct for that.

I had a motherboard that had a similar failure characteristic. "Time to do production. Are you feelin' lucky?"

There are memory checkers that can be run in a continuous loop instead of once at boot. Run for 24 hours. Normal computers handle that no sweat. My machine crashed with a memory strip #2 error sometime after 4:30 AM, test pass number 845.

This testing process also has the advantage that it tests the rest of the machine, too. This can turn up power supply failures.

Do you have good, reliable wall power? I killed off a power socket once.

It's a wonder these things ever worked.

Koz

[TheDrumkid92]

We rerecorded the first episode this morning and I can use the noise gate for smaller sections, but if I try to do it for the entire hour and twenty minutes it comes back with the error screen and wipes the data folders. Thanks to you kind folks, I had everything backed up properly before I tried this, but it seems like if I want to use Noise Gate, I'll have to do it in multiple sections per project instead of all at once. Not the end of the world, but definitely sub-optimal.

The scan didn't turn anything up from our original recording either.

[kozikowski]

A repeatable error is development gold.

I can use the noise gate for smaller sections, but if I try to do it for the entire hour and twenty minutes it comes back with the error screen and wipes the data folders.

Can you get it down to a time break? If I go over xxx minutes it crashes?

Koz

[kozikowski]

Did you tell us how much on-board memory you had?

I'm having flashbacks. My memory crash was in high memory and it only created problems when I edited a complex video segment over a certain length.

Koz

[TheDrumkid92]

I have 16 gb of DDR3 RAM installed. 2 sticks of 8.

I tried applying the Noise Gate effect in increments to figure out how long of a clip I could apply the effect to without freaking it out. It made it all the way up to an hour and 15 minutes. At an hour and 20 minutes it crapped out. Seems like that's my rig's cap.

I should also note that I'm recording in stereo

[steve]

Nyquist is strictly 32-bit. Anything more than 2 GB of data is a serious problem regardless of how much physical RAM is available.

[kozikowski]

Anything more than 2 GB of data

So an hour and 15 minutes of stereo show is the natural Audacity production limit.

That would be good to know.

Koz

[TheDrumkid92]

Side Question:

Is there any benefit to recording in stereo? I just do it b/c it's the default. Should I be doing mono to save on size and make my life easier?