disk space that remains on 1.2.6

[buddy nichols]

My Audacity is saved in drive C on my computer (37 GB with 6.75GB free). The only thing I save to this drive is new soft ware added to computer. I have saved all of my Audacity files to an external 300 GB drive for a year. The venue is a house of worship where I record all messages (no music) to Audacity then export to Wave for Cd's. This drive is now full. In fact, several weeks ago I lost the sound (still had sound track showing in AuP file but no sound after 37 minutes). I have now installed a 1.5TB external drive to store all of my messages.

My Q: While recording in Audacity, the "disk space remains for recording xx hours and xx minutes is 22 hours and xx minutes. Is Audicity looking at the space remaining in C drive where it is installed and (2) can I uninstall Aud in C drive and install it into the new 1.5TB that will then read the space remaining in that drive?

Thank you

[waxcylinder]

My Q: While recording in Audacity, the "disk space remains for recording xx hours and xx minutes is 22 hours and xx minutes. Is Audicity looking at the space remaining in C drive where it is installed

Yes indeed, it is looking at the space availbale and making a calulation of approximate recording time based on your preferences settings.

can I uninstall Aud in C drive and install it into the new 1.5TB that will then read the space remaining in that drive?

You can do that - or you could leave Audaccity installed where it is and reset your preferences so that Audacity's temp/working files ar on the external drive.

BUT I wouldn't recommend either of those approaches - the interfaces to external drives are rarely fast enough to keep up with the demands of audio recording. What I would do, in fact what I do do, would be to keep Audacity and it's working files on your C drive. Then when you come to Export to WAV, Mp3 or whatever - then export that file to the external drive.

WC

[buddy nichols]

Thanks for your advice. Your recommendation is what I am doing (exporting to a different drive to save to wave/mp3. I suppose I need to keep an key on the available space in C-drive to make sure it doesn't become to full. I quess I'm stll curious as to why I lost the sound (still had the audio track showing in aud) in the aud file. When I looked at the data file I could see where the sound stopped. My thoughts were that I had run out of space in the drive that I save the aud file into.

[kozikowski]

If your intention is to keep perfect quality capture masters of the performance, then Export As WAV and push them over to the external drive and, of course, the backup drive. We compulsives used to recommend multiple copies over several drives, but nobody ever actually did that and the lack of bookkeeping created more damage than any crash. Put valuable work on two separate storage "things." I live in LA. I mail a copy of my digital Rolodex to my sister in NY.

The only time the words "MP3" should cross your lips are when somebody wants a copy for their iPod or other music player, or you want to post work on the web. MP3 is a delivery format, WAV is a production and mastering format.

While you horse around with your C: drive, are you error checking and defragmenting? Highly recommended on an audio production machine.

Right Click My Computer > Explore > Right Click C: > Properties > Tools > Error Check and Defragment. Audacity will not work into a full drive (neither will anything else), but it won't work into a badly fragmented drive, either.

Is it written anywhere that the performances have to be in stereo? You can double your drive capacity instantly by doing all the work in mono instead of stereo. Also, far archive storage doesn't have to be in WAV. Any of the more modern audio compression schemes will work. AAC, M4A, MP4, etc., compression will produce a not-quite-perfect music file at a substantial savings in drive space. I captured an hour radio show at 44100, 16-bit, Stereo and it got me a 559MB sound file. QuickTime AAC (MPEG4 Variation) at Very Good iPod Encoding (256-Stereo) gives me a music file of 85.7MB and I can't tell on a good sound system which is which. A mono show would have been smaller yet, (although not half).

Koz