Audacity problem :(

thestorygirl · Post by **thestorygirl** » August 14th, 2014, 4:24 pm

Has this happened to anyone else before?
I'm recording along, and then click 'stop' to end my recording, and decide to go back and replay it a little to see if it sounds right to me. I go back to the beginning... and the first 20 min. of whatever I've recorded is missing!
At first I thought perhaps my mic wire was bent funny and made mental note to be more careful. Today when I hit the record button, I made sure it was recording sound at the beginning, and even got up a few times to check on it during the course of my reading. But when I clicked the Stop button, the first 20 min. were again missing.
The playback button will move along like normal, but everything is complete dead silence (thin line), and then all of a sudden, it kicks on with me in the middle of a sentence and the room's background white noise, too.
Is there something I'm doing wrong?
So far, both times have happened when I recorded a reading 50 min. or more in length (of course that would eventually be edited down). But I have done that before and don't recall problems.
It won't let me save it either. A warning box comes up saying that it isn't writable or that there's a full disk. I don't think I have a full disk. I went and deleted a bunch of old Audacity recordings I didn't need anymore in case that was it, but it still says the same thing. It does let me export to MP3, though.
Any suggestions? I hope this will be relatively simple to solve, to make it easy for any kind souls who take it upon themselves to help me again.

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » August 15th, 2014, 1:03 am

This definitely sounds like insufficient disk space. In Windows, Audacity saves the temporary recordings by default to C:\Users\[yourname]\AppData\Local\Temp\audacity_temp.

If you have a D drive as well as a C Drive, you can change the location of this directory in Audacity Edit | Preferences | Directories and save the temporary files (which are the ones that Audacity saves while you are recording, and can get quite big) to the D drive instead of the C Drive. For more info, see http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Directories_Preferences

To check the disk space, click Start | Computer and right-click Local Disk (C). Click Properties, and it will show you how much free space you have. You will need at least 20GB there.

If you DON'T have more than one drive, you need to clean up your C drive as much as possible. Empty browser caches, and delete all files that you no longer need. Do not, of course, interfere with any system (Windows) files.

As always, save your project frequently, and back up (by exporting as a FLAC) also, in case of accidents.

Ruth

YouTube · Post by **Darvinia** » August 15th, 2014, 2:38 am

thestorygirl wrote: I went and deleted a bunch of old Audacity recordings I didn't need anymore in case that was it, but it still says the same thing.

When you deleted the old Audacity recordings did you make sure to also delete the folder associated with the .aup file? The .aup is quite small so won't make much difference to hard drive space but the folder is the space hog.

For example, if you have a file named booktitle_00_author.aup there will be a folder in the same place named booktitle_00_author_data. You need to delete that and everything in it.

And (probably goes without saying but I'll say it anyway

) if your deleted stuff usually goes to the Recycle Bin, then you need to empty the recycle bin too.

Post by **annise** » August 15th, 2014, 2:51 am

As Ruth said - check which drive Audacity is saving your files and and check how much free space it has.
It uses an enormous amount of space when you are recording and editing , and unfortunately doesn't seem to tell you "Sorry run out of storage" . It just drops a few things and keeps on trying to work.
Similarly if it runs out of resources because something else is running at the same time.

Anne

thestorygirl · Post by **thestorygirl** » August 15th, 2014, 10:23 am

Yes, I did delete the data files along with the recorded files, and deleted recycle bin. So good there.

Yes, I think my laptop has a D drive, but it is called DVD RW Drive (D:). Does that still count if it is a 'Device with Removable Storage'? The Audacity manual says not to choose a network drive. Is this a network drive?

When I go to my username file, I don't see any AppData folder (but I do see the path to it under Directories). If I ever find it on my computer, am I supposed to delete what's in it? Or NOT?

I went to Directories, and it says that I have 848.7 GB of free space. I don't know if that is a big or small amount.

Should I go ahead and change it to D drive? I thought I'd check and see first about all of this before I do any damage!

DrewJ · Post by **DrewJ** » August 15th, 2014, 10:36 am

You could set it to D drive, but it would, at best, simply throw an error and not work. At worst, freeze up your pc.
In your case, the D drive is strictly a disc drive.

That being said, ~800GB of free storage space is huge, so I don't think your problem is storage.

Do you run any programs other than Audacity when recording?

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » August 15th, 2014, 10:45 am

Oh, if you have 800GB free space, then my suggestion is definitely NOT the problem.

Theory 2: that your antivirus software (or something else) was running a scan or updating itself while you were recording, and eating up your memory - not leaving enough for Audacity to work properly. (It is very greedy for memory (RAM) as well as disk space.) Is that a possibility?

Ruth

DrewJ · Post by **DrewJ** » August 15th, 2014, 10:56 am

A hard drive is basically a very large, fancy, complicated record player.
The disk itself is written to, and read from, by a needle.
This is fine, except that Audacity needs the 'needle' the entire time you're recording. So if another program (System Updates, Antivirus) is trying to write to the disk with the same 'needle', you have a problem.

This may be what's wrong, or it could be something entirely different, but if you have a lot of programs open when you record, try closing them and see if the issue stops.

thestorygirl · Post by **thestorygirl** » August 15th, 2014, 11:02 am

This could be it. I know when I started up my computer before I recorded yesterday, it was installing updates. It does that every few days and aggravates me because it doesn't give me an opt out, I don't know how to make it not install, and I think all those updates are slowing my computer down (my computer frequently freezes up about every 10 clicks). I don't think this is antivirus software, though. I think it is Windows updates.

I would go through and delete things (and I have tried before), but most of the time I'm not sure if it is something important I'll need later and I don't want to wreck things!
I'm not sure if it was installing last week when I ran into this same problem before. I can't remember.
What should I do next?
Does this mean that I can't get the missing parts of my recordings back?

I don't think I have anything else open (that I know of)... Unless it is running and I'm not aware of it. How would I find that out?

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » August 16th, 2014, 2:59 am

Your lost bits of recording are permanently lost, I'm afraid.

Re Windows updating itself while you are recording, I did a Windows Update just now and looked to see how much of my computer's resources it was using, and it was using over a quarter of my computer's memory (RAM) and I have 12Gb of RAM! If you have less RAM than that, it is likely that there was not enough RAM free for Audacity to work.

I would suggest turning off automatic Windows Updates while you are recording: instructions for Windows 7: Control Panel | Windows Update | Change Settings. Select "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them". When you have finished recording, you can go back and reselect "Install Updates automatically".

Ruth

Post by **TriciaG** » August 16th, 2014, 9:54 am

You could also leave it as "check for updates but let me choose..." because a little pop-up will show up on your taskbar when there are new updates. You could then install or wait as you feel led and as your Audacity schedule allows, rather than flipping back and forth all the time.

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » August 16th, 2014, 10:04 am

I don't think I have anything else open (that I know of)... Unless it is running and I'm not aware of it. How would I find that out?

I forgot to answer this. You would probably be most surprised to find that your computer is likely to be running all sorts of things in the background. I installed iTunes once and was disgusted to find that it had installed (without telling me) about 6 other programs at the same time. I uninstalled them all eventually, and that's why I won't ever have iTunes on my computer again.

Lots of programs insist on running at start-up, whether you want them to or not.

If you hit CtrlAltDelete (in Windows 7) you can open Task Manager and see just what processes are running at any time. I have no idea if you can do this in Windows 8 - it probably does something horrible, so best not try. Open Office, for instance, sort of 'pre-opens' on start up unless you tell it not to. Now, I don't know about you, but if I want to use Open Office, I am perfectly capable of waiting for it to open, I don't need it already to be half-open. All the processes that are running are using some of your computer's resources.

Bit of a bête noire of mine. I will now cease ranting.

Ruth

thestorygirl · Post by **thestorygirl** » August 16th, 2014, 4:02 pm

Okay, I will definitely try doing that soon. Thanks!

Additional

:
I wish I had been smart enough to delete the first 20 min. of dead silence so I could save my project as .aup file. Instead I guess I was hoping that somehow I could magically get those 20 min. back again, and so saved it all as mp3. I normally don't like to export/import/export, as I know this loses data. But how much data does it really lose if you do it once?

Post by **TriciaG** » August 16th, 2014, 4:18 pm

Once shouldn't be a problem. I think things start losing quality long about export 3-5 or so.

thestorygirl · Post by **thestorygirl** » August 16th, 2014, 4:26 pm

Okay! Just curious... when it loses quality, does it start sounding warped or something? I mean, how does it 'lose data'?