error while opening sound device?

[WKRH]

My recording setup is very basic: Windows 7 and a Blue Snowball microphone. I'd been working on a couple of projects when this same error message suddenly appeared. The first thing I noticed was that the snowball, although still plugged in, was no longer being recognized in Audacity: the tool bar's microphone window had gone blank. My solution was to unplug the microphone, shut down Audacity, plug in again and restart. Everything restored to normal. The only guess I have as to why the above happened is that a Firefox App running in the background decided to do something on its own. I think this because, while I was working on Audacity, an internet page flashed into view for an instant and disappeared. Anyone else have such strange "visitations" from the web?

[Gale Andrews]

My recording setup is very basic: Windows 7 and a Blue Snowball microphone. I'd been working on a couple of projects when this same error message suddenly appeared. The first thing I noticed was that the snowball, although still plugged in, was no longer being recognized in Audacity: the tool bar's microphone window had gone blank. My solution was to unplug the microphone, shut down Audacity, plug in again and restart. Everything restored to normal. The only guess I have as to why the above happened is that a Firefox App running in the background decided to do something on its own. I think this because, while I was working on Audacity, an internet page flashed into view for an instant and disappeared. Anyone else have such strange "visitations" from the web?

I split this from http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2715 as that topic was about a number of users in different scenarios (the most recent being on Vista recording cassette tapes). Although it was good you looked at the topic, It is usually much more convenient to discuss a new poster's specific issues separately, unless the circumstances are completely identical. Also I have split this to the 1.3 Beta board because you should be using 1.3.13 Beta on Windows 7.

USB devices can fail if the computer no longer has the resources to support the bandwidth or if you make the mistake of connecting to a USB hub which shares the bandwidth with other USB devices. Also if you are short of resources, all kind of behaviour including unwanted task switching can occur.

Your actions to remedy the problem were good.

If you are already using 1.3 Beta, I suggest you check that "Audio Cache" in the Directories preferences is turned off, because this will consume a lot of RAM (memory) if you are editing a project.



Gale