Trouble exporting to wav or mp3

[ClaireOKC]

Really strange....had no problems then suddenly Audacity jams when exporting to wav or mp3 - have uninstalled, rebooted, downloaded 1.2.6, reinstalled - not working - finally downloaded beta version, and that works....any ideas are welcomed....thanks, C

[nettlesprout]

No solution I'm afraid, just got EXACTLY the same problem. Did you ever sort it out?

[steve]

I've not had this problem with Audacity (I use the beta), but I have had this problem with other software - caused by hardware not liking the bit depth. Try making all samples / tracks 16 bit 44.1 KHz before you export.

No guarantees, but worth a try - let us know how you get on.

[nettlesprout]

many cheers for the advice - unfortunately I've already got those bit settings. Any other ideas welcome!

[kozikowski]

Sudden Unexplained Windows Insanity may be caused by:

--Hard drives filling up. Audacity needs a lot of elbow room to do production, especially if you decide to perform dual-pass MP3 exports on a 2 hour long show. Suddenly, the machine has to come up with gigs of storage.

--A cousin hard drive problem. When was the last time you checked and defragged your hard drives? We took a production machine out of service that was so full of garbage and fragments of files that it froze and we couldn't bring it back. There was still room on it, too.

--Virus or Trojan infection. There is a good 24-hour gap between a virus entering the wild and the signature update to your protection software. When was the last time you did a massive system scan? You can only leave it in "auto" just so long before you have to show up and test it.

--Actual machine failure. The Microsoft Memory Tester is highly recommended. It will find all sorts of things wrong with your machine in addition to just testing the memory.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Memo ... stic.shtml

--Microsoft upgraded you too far. Not all Microsoft upgrades are beneficial and MS is sending them all the time. I get suspicious when several people all show up within a day of each other all complaining about the same system level problems.

--You run Vista. Life on the leading edge is scary. This is me not doing that.

Koz

[mbrenneman]

Right now I'm trying to export to MP3 a podcast of less than 14 minutes, and the timer tells me it will take 14 hours. It's been an hour and a half so far and I still only have two squares in the progress bar, so I'm starting to believe the timer, as incredible as it seems.

The podcast is only speech, 16 bit 44.1 KHz; I have 1 GB RAM, WinXP SP2, up-to-date security, fairly clean hard drive.

I've had so many problems with Audacity I am *this* close to shelling out $40 for some other software. I've posted elsewhere in this forum about a consistent problem with audio playback not synchronizing the left and right output, creating an echo.

I'm curious about whether making many edits to the track may have done me in. I'm working from a speech recorded live in a meeting hall, so I cut out a lot of pauses, filler words, clapping and so forth. Yesterday I began to suspect that every time I deleted an "um" I was increasing the overhead of the Audacity file, because after I finished with that I tried to insert an introductory track and all I got was crash after crash. So I exported my project as an MP3, and that took *only* an hour or so. Then today I created a new project, inserted my introduction and the edited MP3, and now I'm trying to export the new project to a new MP3.

I cannot believe that it would be this hard with Cakewalk. This is my first try with Audacity--should I give up and get out my credit card?

--Melissa

[alatham]

Melissa,

First off, don't export to mp3 during the middle of editing a project. Export to WAV. Exporting to mp3 should be the very last step in a project.

As for why Audacity is slowing down, I can't say. Are you still using 1.2.6, or have you moved to the beta?

If you're still using 1.2.6, you can try reinstalling it again, but this time clean the registry while Audacity is uninstalled. This will reset all your settings, but it might also clear up whatever is causing Audacity to export slowly.

Read the last post here and download that file:
http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 6638#p6638

You'll have to uninstall Audacity, run 'regedit' from the Start menu -> Run box. Once you open that, immediately click File -> Export. At the bottom, select 'All' instead of 'Selected branch'. Then save that file to your desktop. You've just made a clean copy of your registry on the off chance that you need to revert to it.

Now you should close regedit and run that file you first downloaded. That should clean out any mention of Audacity in your registry and should be able to reinstall from scratch. At this point, either Audacity will run like it first ran, or it will continue to run slowly. If that fixes it, then great. But if you still have trouble then something other than Audacity is causing it.

A few more questions:
Are you exporting your files to the hard drive that sits inside your computer? Or are you using an external or (gulp) network drive?
Does it export really slowly when you try to Export to WAV? This should always be faster than exporting to mp3.
Do you have a virus checker running? Those programs suffer from neo-fascism and can interfere with Audacity if they're allowed to check every file going to and from your hard drive. Try disabling it temporarily (unplug the network cable if you're paranoid).

[mbrenneman]

alatham, you are a genius. And I'm clearly, um, not.

I thought I was working off of my local drive, but I was working in the My Documents folder. The My Documents folder is set to synchronize on login/logout with my network folder. So, just to be REALLY sure that I was working on the local folder, I moved my Audacity stuff out of My Documents onto C:. Problems all solved!

You're the greatest. No, really, you are.

--Melissa

[alatham]

Genius, no. Thanks though.

I just remember that someone else had a very similar problem 3 months ago. It took a week to figure out he was running on a network drive.