Audacity skips


Forum: Multimedia
Topic: Audacity skips
started by: buzzard
Posted by buzzard on Mar. 12 2007,03:44
I loaded DSL on an 850MHz computer with the intention of using it to record music tracks using the "Audacity" application.

The problem is:
While recording, Audacity stops listening for about 0.1 second every 45 seconds or so, causing gaps in the recording.  That would be fine for talk, but I am trying to record music.  I tried disabling the meter bar, the scroll, anything that would hog cpu time.  I even tried lowering the sample rate and the bits.

The glitch seems to occur whenever it writes data to the harddrive.  I looked in proc, and it shows HD on irq14, audio on 17.

I can record audio on a 233MHz win98 machine, so CPU speed shouldn't be the problem....??  DMA conflict?  Crappy audio hardware?

I can supply DMESG if needed (fairly large file).
Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Mar. 12 2007,05:09
If it's related to the hd...
is dma enabled on it?
Posted by mikshaw on Mar. 12 2007,14:09
Do you have a temp directory specified in preferences?

Any difference between recording in stereo and mono?
Posted by ron on Mar. 12 2007,14:22
Buzzard, it's a problem with Audacity not Linux. It's quite heavy on system resources, and can introduce latency artifacts depending on how much memory is available to the buffer. You have 2 choices: either change the Audacity preferences so that the buffer size is increased, or use another app to record the audio (you can use Audacity to process it afterward). The latter option is more likely to work. Audacity can cause these problems with Windows as well. The reason it might not do so could be that the version you're running on your Windows machine is much older. :0

Something else you might try: use ALSA drivers instead of OSS, and see what happens.
Posted by buzzard on Mar. 13 2007,02:33
Quote (mikshaw @ Mar. 12 2007,09:09)
Do you have a temp directory specified in preferences?

Any difference between recording in stereo and mono?

Yes, I have /mnt/hda1/aud/ for my temp dir.

When recording in stereo, it will record, but skips.
When recording in mono, it records at half the specified sample rate. (not sure if it skips in mono, i only rec. a few seconds in mono)
Posted by buzzard on Mar. 13 2007,03:30
Quote (ron @ Mar. 12 2007,09:22)
Buzzard, it's a problem with Audacity not Linux. It's quite heavy on system resources, and can introduce latency artifacts depending on how much memory is available to the buffer. You have 2 choices: either change the Audacity preferences so that the buffer size is increased, or use another app to record the audio (you can use Audacity to process it afterward). The latter option is more likely to work. Audacity can cause these problems with Windows as well. The reason it might not do so could be that the version you're running on your Windows machine is much older. :0

Something else you might try: use ALSA drivers instead of OSS, and see what happens.

I've seen XmmS balk on this same computer while playing large .wav files.  (pauses while the disk reads)  I'll try those ALSA drivers; I think I saw some on the MYDSL webpage.

(oh, and on windows i wasn't using audacity, i had a different sound recording thing that only did one track)

thanks for the advice, ill let you know how it goes.
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