Anyone familiar with the audio editor/recorder application Audacity?

[Syrinx]

I was using it last night to record the radio broadcast of the BCS championship game.

And I lost a good chunk of it (about six minutes or so, via the game clock), because the program seemed to spring a serious memory leak.

I did a dry-run a few days ago, just to make sure everything would work. I jacked my radio into my soundcard, tuned to the specific radio station, and recorded well over four hours of audio. The resulting WAV file was quite big, almost 3 GB, but it worked perfectly.

I did a software upgrade in the meantime (Linux Mint), but I'm not sure if Audacity was one of the programs updated.

When I noticed that Audacity had crashed, I did a "free" command, and saw that I was almost out of actual RAM, though my swap still had a lot of room.

I rebooted, and ran nothing but a terminal and Audacity. Except, of course, all the stuff that Linux Mint runs automatically, most of which I probably don't need.

I managed to get the rest of the game recorded, but it wasn't particularly easy.

I wish I had specific numbers to report, but I was busy trying to actually watch the game on ESPN.

But it seems like my RAM was being eat up at roughly the same rate that Audacity's temp "au" files were filling my "/tmp" directory.

I only have 2GB of RAM, which is pretty small by today's standards, but I can't think of any legitimate reason that recording audio should exhaust RAM like that. I had nearly a TB of free disk space.

I just checked my version of Audacity, and it says 1.3.13-beta. I'm not sure why Mint/Ubuntu would use beta software.

Anyone have any info on this problem? I could probably explain it better if I hadn't been up all night celebrating the outcome of the ball game.

BTW, if anyone has the Eli Gold broadcast from the late first quarter into the early second quarter, I would really appreciate that.

Thanks.

[bemildred]

1. You probably need to get the lame MP3 codec and set MP3 to be the record format.

Raw sound files get large fast.

http://lame.sourceforge.net/

I have used Audacity a good deal, and while the user interface annoys me a bit, it works well once you get the hang of it.

[bemildred]

2. PS: RAM and disc space are different.

RAM is generally some small fraction of disc storage.

Think of it this way, A CD holds 6 or 7 hundred thousand bytes, say .7G, so 3 CDs worth of sound will fill up your 2 Gig of RAM, so that's 2 or 3 hours.

[Syrinx]

3. Yeah, I know

But I don't know why Audacity would need to store the entire recording in RAM at one time, since it's being stored as files in the /tmp directory anyway. Maybe the programmers didn't think of people making recordings of four-hour long events.

[bemildred]

4. Programmers do make mistakes.

But yeah, I'm guessing they didn't really think in terms of 4 hour recordings, and one is always worried about speed when doing real-time collection of data, which is what recording is.

I would probably want to break it up into smaller pieces anyway.

[Confusious]

5. I recently switched to streamripper

for recording Internet audio streams. Mplayer was using 100% of one CPU.

Very light weight, it dumps audio to a file that you can listen to immediately. You might have to compile from source, though. I didn't check to see if they had packages, since I usually compile from source.

Oh, and I regularly record 3 hour blocks of audio, Saturday is 6 hours for 'Stars End.'

Oh, if you want to keep using Audacity, there might be a switch to dump the audio to file. With Mplayer it was -dumpaudio -dumpfile, audacity might have something similar.

[bemildred]

6. Cool, I'm going to check that out. nt

[bemildred]

7. PS: thinking about it, Audacity provides very powerful editing.

I think that is why they kept in in memory, you try to edit something big like that from disc, it's going to be too slow for interactive work. But it's true, I'm guessing.