distorted & garbled after 50 minutes

[videojohnh]

Hello. I used Audicity 1.3.7 on WinXP recording via firewire from an Alesis Multimix 16. Consistently, recordings longer than 50 minutes are garbled and distorted on all 16 tracks. Why is this? Can it be fixed? And, of course, this was a critical recording live concert.

[kozikowski]

So this only happened once?

Let's see, eight stereo channels at 700 MB/hour. That's a finished, uncompressed show of about 5.6GB, and all of happening in real time. I'd be capturing this on at least an internal dual drive RAID 0 array to get the speed and capacity up. Effectively, a super fast D:

You might be able to use one single D: drive, but it would need to be a 7200 or 10000 RPM drive with either SCSI (cringe) or Fiber Channel.

Nobody will be doing this job on a single drive C: computer no matter how well behaved and defragmented it is.

In addition, the show will have sailed right through both the 2GB and the 4GB Windows address boundrys over the course of capture becoming potentially more and more unstable as it goes.

Outside of that you should be fine. Can you post some of the clean and then some of the garbled sound somewhere?

Koz

[videojohnh]

It occurred on 3 consecutive nights, during the 50th minute until the end of the recording. The drive was F: and is SATA 500 GB. I have done 45 minutes several times, no problem, until now I record about 1 hour, for each 1st and 2nd half of the performance. This is a P4 2 GHz cpu. I recorded 16 channels via firewire from the Alesis Multimix 16.

[kozikowski]

<<<SATA 500 GB.>>>

Internal?

<<<3 consecutive nights, during the 50th minute until the end of the recording. >>>

So a capture like this has never worked right?

Koz

[waxcylinder]

F: drive sounds like an external disk to me.

It is not normally recommended to do audio capture with Audacity to an external disk. An external disk is unlikely to be fast enough to keep up with the rigorous demands of digital audio capture. Instead I would do the capture and edit onto your internal hard drive (C: drive) and then export your production WAV/MP3/whatever files to you external disk. And then delete the Audacity project from your C: drive.

WC

[videojohnh]

This is an internal 500 GB SATA drive. I have 2 drives, drive 1 (ATA) with 3 partitions, and this 500 GB SATA as drive F: for work storage. I have done other projects like this succesfully, but they were all under 45 minutes. This is the first project I've recorded longer than 50 minutes, actually about 1 hour on all recordings, and all of these had this problem. The previous recordings under 45 minutes were without this problem. The garbled audio starts during the 50th minute and continues until the end of the recording.

[kozikowski]

Did you check your private messages?
Koz