Lost Data! Pls Send Halp!

[kozikowski]

Mono is always recommended unless there is a specific production reason for stereo. I used to deliver single voice tracks in stereo because I had no storage restriction and I knew that's what the video editor clients were expecting.

ACX AudioBook recommends delivering readings in mono.

Koz

[steve]

Is there any benefit to recording in stereo?

If it's a single microphone recording, then no, no benefit, just more data if lossless, or lower quality if exported in a lossy format (such as MP3).

[Gale Andrews]

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.

What I see in 2.1.3 and 2.2.0-alpha in Windows 10 is that the memory use is rolled back when it gets too much. 2.2.0-alpha is working code for our next release.

In 2.1.3 the AU files for the entire project are deleted when Audacity quits due to the memory exception, even tracks that were not being processed by Noise Gate. When you try to recover, you have to wait while Audacity writes silent block files for the project. The log is whited out for me so I can't see what the consistency errors are claimed to be.

Given it is quite common for Nyquist plugins that write to memory to crash Audacity, I am surprised no-one found this before. Perhaps it is a flaw specific to Noise Gate?

2.2.0-alpha is much better in terms of preserving data. There is no exception error. After the memory rollback you see a single message box such as "Audacity failed to read from a file at S:\hgfjgig_data\e00\d03\e00036c9.au". But there is no information in the log and no indication why the error occurred. However the main thing is that there is no crash, no data loss and you can close and reopen the project normally.


Gale

[kozikowski]

How many people use NoiseGate on a 90 minute show? Stereo? How many people thought it was their fault, and then how many people turned it in? We are warned against extrapolating massive failures from a single forum post. It works the other way, too.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

We are warned against extrapolating massive failures from a single forum post. It works the other way, too.

See my post above which results I have reproduced many times.


Gale

[steve]

In 2.1.3 the AU files for the entire project are deleted when Audacity quits due to the memory exception, even tracks that were not being processed by Noise Gate.

So that was a bug in Audacity 2.1.3 which has been fixed in 2.2.0 alpha?

Given it is quite common for Nyquist plugins that write to memory to crash Audacity, I am surprised no-one found this before. Perhaps it is a flaw specific to Noise Gate?

I've been testing Noise Gate (this version: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyqui ... Noise_Gate) in Audacity 2.1.3 on Xubuntu.
I've tested with well over 2 hours of audio, both mono and stereo, and it's working perfectly - no crashes.

It does appear to "freeze" for a while when processing long tracks, though it is not actually freezing. The progress indicator bar only monitors the generation of the gain envelope, so it sits at "100% complete" for quite a while the envelope is being applied before the waveform is redrawn. I don't know how that limitation could be fixed, other than implementing the Noise Gate as a built-in (C++) effect (which would be good to do).

[Gale Andrews]

In 2.1.3 the AU files for the entire project are deleted when Audacity quits due to the memory exception, even tracks that were not being processed by Noise Gate.

So that was a bug in Audacity 2.1.3 which has been fixed in 2.2.0 alpha?

Try it yourself on 64-bit Windows. I guess the safeguarding of data as part of Paul's wider work on http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437 has effected the Improvement.

Given it is quite common for Nyquist plugins that write to memory to crash Audacity, I am surprised no-one found this before. Perhaps it is a flaw specific to Noise Gate?

I've been testing Noise Gate (this version: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyqui ... Noise_Gate) in Audacity 2.1.3 on Xubuntu.
I've tested with well over 2 hours of audio, both mono and stereo, and it's working perfectly - no crashes.

As I recall in previous testing, some 64-bit Linux kernels seemingly do let you store more than 2 GB RAM for Nyquist per Audacity application. I have seen 2.5 GB Audacity RAM use on Ubuntu 16.04, which memory use drops to circa 80 MB when the Nyquist plugin finishes processing.

On Windows 64-bit, 32-bit Audacity, there is an exception error using the plugin at about 1.5 GB of Audacity memory use, in 2.1.3 or 2.2.0-alpha. I have not tried the experimental 64-bit Windows builds of Audacity that are available.


Gale

It does appear to "freeze" for a while when processing long tracks, though it is not actually freezing. The progress indicator bar only monitors the generation of the gain envelope, so it sits at "100% complete" for quite a while the envelope is being applied before the waveform is redrawn. I don't know how that limitation could be fixed, other than implementing the Noise Gate as a built-in (C++) effect (which would be good to do).

[steve]

As I recall in previous testing, some 64-bit Linux kernels seemingly do let you store more than 2 GB RAM for Nyquist per Audacity application.

That seems to be so, and is a pleasant surprise.

Testing Noise Gate on 32-bit Debian with Audacity 2.1.3, Audacity crashes when memory use exceeds 2 GB. It worked fine with 1h 10min mono, 44100 Hz.