Help! Perfect recording suddenly distorted!

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Ealswythe
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Post by Ealswythe »

I worked all day on my recording, noise reduction, compression, Replay gain, amplify, etc, It was perfect, sounded perfect. Suddenly, at the end, when I was ready to export to mp3, the sound distorted BADLY, but the recording LOOKS exactly the same! To undistort it, I have to de-amplify to a ridiculous extreme. The recording is destroyed. But it looks normal. What do I do, aside from re-doing the entire thing? :help: :help:
(I've done a lot of other recordings, and this has never happened)
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annise
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Post by annise »

I assume you've tried the edit undo to see if you can get back ? If it's still open of course.
Have you anything saved from when you finished recording ? Exporting to flac seems a waste most of the time - but Oh! the joy when something unexpected happens.

Anne
Ealswythe
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Joined: June 19th, 2017, 4:35 pm
Location: Los Angeles, by way of New York City

Post by Ealswythe »

I've tried the edit undo, but there was nothing there to undo. My computer corrupted the file when I went online to reply to a librivox post that I'd made. This problem has happened before, and it has something to do with doing something online while Audacity is open. Oh well, I learned my lesson. Today, I will just re-do the entire recording. :roll:

Thank you for your reply! :)
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bluechien
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Post by bluechien »

This is probably not the case but Audacity is normally so stable, the only time I have heard of weird things happening like this is when the user is short on free hard drive space. That can lead to unrecoverable and serious problems because of all the temp space that Audacity uses when processing tracks. Just a thought, probably not the relevant one.
Eva D
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annise
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Post by annise »

Usually when Audaity is short of space and processing availability it just starts leaving bits out . It is a resources hog . But exporting it as a .flac or something really pays, re recording is not fun :(

Anne
Ealswythe
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Post by Ealswythe »

bluechien wrote:This is probably not the case but Audacity is normally so stable, the only time I have heard of weird things happening like this is when the user is short on free hard drive space. That can lead to unrecoverable and serious problems because of all the temp space that Audacity uses when processing tracks. Just a thought, probably not the relevant one.
I don't think that's the case with my computer. I have a MacBook Pro, and it has a lot of free space on it. But it is an interesting thing to look into. Thanks!
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annise
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Post by annise »

It's processing resources as well, when I started recording things went awry when the virus scan automatically started up. That took me a while to find out. So background running of anything can cause problems. And also there may be lots of spare space but not in the area that Audacity uses. I'm not convinced this is what happened but it can't be ruled out.

Anne
Ealswythe
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Joined: June 19th, 2017, 4:35 pm
Location: Los Angeles, by way of New York City

Post by Ealswythe »

annise wrote:It's processing resources as well, when I started recording things went awry when the virus scan automatically started up. That took me a while to find out. So background running of anything can cause problems. And also there may be lots of spare space but not in the area that Audacity uses. I'm not convinced this is what happened but it can't be ruled out.

Anne
Thank you. It can be any of those things. I'm definitely not going to start running anything again when Audacity is up. And I will export to FLAC.
Anyway, the good news is that I re-recorded the same file today, and the recording quality was even better! So I'm happy!
:D
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annise
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Post by annise »

:thumbs:
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