[Colin B.]

In rec.audio.tech Laurence Payne lpayne1NOSPAM@dsldotpipexdotcom wrote:
On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 20:23:14 -0400, "Arny Krueger"
wrote:

Just because you have dropouts and glitches on some particular computer,
does not necessarily supporting claims about computers in general, even
computers of just that clock speed. I've seen 400 MHz machines record
multitrack flawlessly, and I've see 3 GHz machines that added dropouts and
clicks to just stereo.

My first PC was a 200MHZ Pentium. I did a lot of multi-track
recording on it. A 1GHZ box is way more than adequate. Look for
another reason for your problems.

I agree. Let me be a bit more clear about this.

With old versions of Audacity, I recorded files fine on my old Celeron
400MHz. However, other bugs caused problems, and I upgraded. The newest
(as of May) version of Audacity eliminated most of those bugs, but also game
me the dropouts.

What sort of glitches? They couldn't be overloads?

Nope. I'm pretty careful to set my levels. What I'm getting is missing
chunks, of a fraction of a second at a time. When I'm recording voice, I'll
get something like this:

(sample original text from a tape deck, record, etc.)
"To ensure impartial judgement of a wine, it should be served blind..."
(what actually gets recorded)
"To ensure impargement of a winet should be served blind..."

It sounds very much like an uncorrectible error you'd get from playing
back a damaged CD.

The load average is always 100% when recording, and it's 99+% audacity,
according to the Task Manager. I suspect that's where the problem lies.

However, even if I could get clean data into Audacity (and I can, if I
use something else to record), I find that the way it eats memory when I'm
chopping up a .wav file is a problem as well. The more pieces I break a
file into, the slower it gets. When editing some language tapes, I was
typically breaking a 25-minute recording (i.e. one side of a tape) into
about 15 tracks. By the time I got than ten tracks split out, the CPU would
sit at 100% all the time, and take as long as 10-15 seconds to respond to
a single mouse-click.

I've got no problems whatsoever with other programs. Goldwave is flawless,
and a remarkably light load. Of course it's not free, but it's good enough
(and enough of an improvement over free tools) that I'm happy to pay the
$50.

I should add that a year or two ago, when I was doing some recording with
an older version of Audacity, I came across a simple bug and also a problem
in the documentation, and contacted the authors. They replied within a day,
clarifying the documentation (which was later changed) and acknowledging the
bug (which was later fixed). It's a good team, and a good effort, but over
the years I keep trying it, and being beaten by one thing or another.

Colin