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#1
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Audacity help needed
Hi;
About 10 months ago I used Audacity to make a large recording on my PC. I edited several tracks and exported them out as mp3s with no problem. I had the intention of coming back later to finish the project. I just sat back down with this project, and when I opened the data folder, I found it contains thousands of files containing about 6 seconds at a time of each channel of the original recording recording. This is nothing like what I recall. Is there an automated or simple way to reassemble this data for editing that I am overlooking? I tried to manually work on it, but it's way to cumbersome. Any help is appreciated. |
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#2
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#4
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Tomas Bicsak wrote:
On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:52:53 +0000, Michael Maclean wrote: An Audacity project has the extension .aup. They usually look something like a file called Project.aup and a directory called Project_data. I discovered earlier today that Audacity can screw up the project file by entering the project name incorrectly in the .aup file, so that you get the tracks in the right places but no audio there. Luckily it's an XML file so it was easy to fix. This is a primary reason why Open Source software is not to be trusted in a commercial environment. I've had similar (even worse) data corruption with commercial applications. Good software is good software, bad software is bad software. I had a similar problem with Audacity, the Linux version, and it was enough for me to go right back to Cubase. I had some glitches with an early version of Audacity I tried, but recent builds have been quite reliable. Open Source and free software is a good concept but it suffers from adequate testing and hides behind a mantra of "it's free so what do you expect". Some Open Source software suffers thusly. Some does not. One can say the exact same thing about many commercial applications. e.g. some code emanating from Redmond which purports to be release quality but proves itself to have not been tested sufficiently. I tried to make Linux work in my studio because it looked like a decent, cheap alternative to the overpriced Windows programs I was using, many of which were in dire need of upgrading. I spent 3 months trying to make the likes of Audacity, Ardour, rosegarden,Jack and others work cleanly and I finally gave up because it was a massive cluster****. I walked away from the entire project with the feeling that despite the applications being free, my time is not. Linux on desktops is still in need of some work before it will become appealing to a mainstream audience. Audio is even further behind. Looking at the progress made in the past few years, I have confidence it will get there. |
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#5
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On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:20:47 -0800, Kurt Albershardt wrote:
Tomas Bicsak wrote: On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:52:53 +0000, Michael Maclean wrote: An Audacity project has the extension .aup. They usually look something like a file called Project.aup and a directory called Project_data. I discovered earlier today that Audacity can screw up the project file by entering the project name incorrectly in the .aup file, so that you get the tracks in the right places but no audio there. Luckily it's an XML file so it was easy to fix. This is a primary reason why Open Source software is not to be trusted in a commercial environment. I've had similar (even worse) data corruption with commercial applications. Good software is good software, bad software is bad software. I had a similar problem with Audacity, the Linux version, and it was enough for me to go right back to Cubase. I had some glitches with an early version of Audacity I tried, but recent builds have been quite reliable. Open Source and free software is a good concept but it suffers from adequate testing and hides behind a mantra of "it's free so what do you expect". Some Open Source software suffers thusly. Some does not. One can say the exact same thing about many commercial applications. e.g. some code emanating from Redmond which purports to be release quality but proves itself to have not been tested sufficiently. I tried to make Linux work in my studio because it looked like a decent, cheap alternative to the overpriced Windows programs I was using, many of which were in dire need of upgrading. I spent 3 months trying to make the likes of Audacity, Ardour, rosegarden,Jack and others work cleanly and I finally gave up because it was a massive cluster****. I walked away from the entire project with the feeling that despite the applications being free, my time is not. Linux on desktops is still in need of some work before it will become appealing to a mainstream audience. Audio is even further behind. Looking at the progress made in the past few years, I have confidence it will get there. As a musician, after a very bad experience over the summer in a studio that was running Linux, I will never deal with anyone using that miserable system again. The producer had a bunch of tracks he wanted to fly into the session and it just turned to **** with all the sync problems. The company that was producing the spot finally gave up, paid us (thank God) and moved on. Last word I heard, the studio was being sued for loss of revenue. Linux may be great for geeks and dweebs who have a server farm but for audio production it just plain sucks. kck |
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#6
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#7
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#8
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Mike Rivers wrote:
I'm not sure I know what an XML file is, so it probably wouldn't be easy for me to fix. I use Audacity in a pretty simple way - straight recording and simple editing, saving my work as a WAV file (I guess that's "export" rather than "save") so I know what and where it is and what I can do with it. An XML file is like an HTML file, except that it can be used for anything. And I mean *anything*. You get to create your own tags, so basically XML is a simple, clean (although verbose) way of figuring out how to put virtually anything into a text file. This could be an XML file: newsgroups group name="rec.audio.pro" common-tangentpolitics/common-tangent common-tangentreligion/common-tangent common-tangentthe bad pop music these days/common-tangent /group /newsgroups Or this could be an XML file describing things I need to do over the next few days: day date="2005-01-25" task nametake out trash/name priorityurgent/priority /task task nameorganize my rubber band collection/name prioritylow/priority /task /day day date="2005-01-26" task namego to that stupid meeting/name /task task namedo a load of laundry/name /task /day Anyway, part of the point of XML is that basically anybody can look at it and figure out what it means and what to do with it. (Unfortunately, in practice sometimes XML files get to be hundreds of thousands of lines long, so that doesn't always work, but in *principle*...) - Logan |
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#9
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"Mike Rivers" wrote in message news:znr1106617144k@trad... In article writes: I spent 3 months trying to make the likes of Audacity, Ardour, rosegarden,Jack and others work cleanly and I finally gave up because it was a massive cluster****. I walked away from the entire project with the feeling that despite the applications being free, my time is not. That last sentence should be on a sign on my wall. I just recently got a "real" ISP account and for the first time, was faced with using Outlook Express of finding an alternative. Having heard of all the risks with OutX and the glowing reports about Mozilla Thunderbird (an open source "it grew there" project) I'm using Thunderbird now, but I dunno. Every time I look for something perfectly reasonable for it to do beyond mail and news tasks, I hit a wall. For instance, it seems reasonable that I should be able to merge mailing lists on my desktop and laptop so I have everyone's address wherever I am, and I got this long, convolouted process involving deleting things and backing up other things. I think I may go back to the dark side. I tried 6-8 of the most popular newsreaders and came back very gratefully to Outlook Express. I can't imagine how people put up with such clunky, counter-intuitive, poorly-written applications? |
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#10
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Richard Crowley wrote:
"Mike Rivers" wrote in message news:znr1106617144k@trad... I just recently got a "real" ISP account and for the first time, was faced with using Outlook Express of finding an alternative. Having heard of all the risks with OutX and the glowing reports about Mozilla Thunderbird (an open source "it grew there" project) I'm using Thunderbird now, but I dunno. Every time I look for something perfectly reasonable for it to do beyond mail and news tasks, I hit a wall. For instance, it seems reasonable that I should be able to merge mailing lists on my desktop and laptop so I have everyone's address wherever I am, and I got this long, convolouted process involving deleting things and backing up other things. I think I may go back to the dark side. I tried 6-8 of the most popular newsreaders and came back very gratefully to Outlook Express. I can't imagine how people put up with such clunky, counter-intuitive, poorly-written applications? OE handily bests Outlook and pretty much anything else MS has come up with for (mostly) standards-based intercommunication. OTOH Mozilla Thunderbird easily matches or bests OE at mail- and/or newsreading. If you want automagically propagating mail merge, address book, etc. for your work processor, spreadsheet, and the like you are pretty much condemned to picking a system (MS, Apple, OpenOffice) and sticking with it. |
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#11
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On 25 Jan 2005 00:08:16 -0500, Mike Rivers wrote:
In article writes: An Audacity project has the extension .aup. They usually look something like a file called Project.aup and a directory called Project_data. I discovered earlier today that Audacity can screw up the project file by entering the project name incorrectly in the .aup file, so that you get the tracks in the right places but no audio there. Luckily it's an XML file so it was easy to fix. I'm not sure I know what an XML file is, so it probably wouldn't be easy for me to fix. I use Audacity in a pretty simple way - straight recording and simple editing, saving my work as a WAV file (I guess that's "export" rather than "save") so I know what and where it is and what I can do with it. XML is plain text. Plain text can be fixed with vi (the One True Editor) or EMACS (a decent OS that lacks a good editor) rather than proprietary tools. The "trick" is knowing what the various tags mean. MS has moved towards using XML lately, but don't bother asking them about their tags--not something a recording engineering should be worrying about, IMO, but some guys like futzing with bits. My alternative to Audacity is some Turtle Beach package I bought because it came with a game port MIDI cable and was cheaper than the cable by itself. Audacity works better and has thus far been Good Enough for my needs, but I'm not doing commercial-scaled work. If you're running a business, you want it to Just Work. I'm not, so my next purchase will be GOOD monitors and hold off on making a software decision for another years tax refund. I've never had trouble with it, but . . . One of the issues with Linux in audio is that it's not "Hard Realtime" which is essential for lossless audio. Commercial software works around the limitations of Win32 or OS-X. Doing that is difficult and requires substantial mindshare--and money. There are hard-realtime versions of Linux, but they are commercial distros, not free versions. If it REALLY mattered, you'd use something like a small embedded processor running VxWorks, which is even more bucks, but designed from the ground up for hard realtime performance. N. B. that no audio package that I'm aware of goes to that trouble, Win32 and OX-x being Good Enough. (Hard Realtime is best defined this way: "If an event happens that is not handled within x milliseconds, things will blow up -- sometimes literally.") |
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#12
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On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 14:51:39 +0000, Charles Krug wrote:
On 25 Jan 2005 00:08:16 -0500, Mike Rivers wrote: In article writes: An Audacity project has the extension .aup. They usually look something like a file called Project.aup and a directory called Project_data. I discovered earlier today that Audacity can screw up the project file by entering the project name incorrectly in the .aup file, so that you get the tracks in the right places but no audio there. Luckily it's an XML file so it was easy to fix. I'm not sure I know what an XML file is, so it probably wouldn't be easy for me to fix. I use Audacity in a pretty simple way - straight recording and simple editing, saving my work as a WAV file (I guess that's "export" rather than "save") so I know what and where it is and what I can do with it. XML is plain text. Plain text can be fixed with vi (the One True Editor) or EMACS (a decent OS that lacks a good editor) rather than proprietary tools. The "trick" is knowing what the various tags mean. MS has moved towards using XML lately, but don't bother asking them about their tags--not something a recording engineering should be worrying about, IMO, but some guys like futzing with bits. My alternative to Audacity is some Turtle Beach package I bought because it came with a game port MIDI cable and was cheaper than the cable by itself. Audacity works better and has thus far been Good Enough for my needs, but I'm not doing commercial-scaled work. If you're running a business, you want it to Just Work. I'm not, so my next purchase will be GOOD monitors and hold off on making a software decision for another years tax refund. I've never had trouble with it, but . . . One of the issues with Linux in audio is that it's not "Hard Realtime" which is essential for lossless audio. Commercial software works around the limitations of Win32 or OS-X. Doing that is difficult and requires substantial mindshare--and money. There are hard-realtime versions of Linux, but they are commercial distros, not free versions. There are hard realtime versions of Linux, but I don't think they are used for audio. You do low latency in normal Linux in much the same way as Windows and OSX, by setting soft realtime with SCHED_FIFO. This says 'Always give this process the cpu time it needs, but there is no absolute guarantee that it will get it'. Any program can request this in Windows at the moment, but as in Linux, it's 'dangerous', ie any program with that priority can use all the CPU time and lock the machine. While that's acceptable for Windows users, it's not a long term solution, so Linux is moving to an OSX like method with CPU limits on soft real time processes. Still, the present method works well enough for low latency audio in either OS. Linux does perhaps have a small advantage when using JACK, as it acts as a watchdog and can drop clients when they timeout. If it REALLY mattered, you'd use something like a small embedded processor running VxWorks, which is even more bucks, but designed from the ground up for hard realtime performance. N. B. that no audio package that I'm aware of goes to that trouble, Win32 and OX-x being Good Enough. Real Hard Realtime brings it's own problems...For example it means realtime threads locking memory, and not touching the disk drives as they are non deterministic (the latency of a read/write cannot be guaranteed). It works if you accept worst case scenarios for everything, but that means low throughput. (Hard Realtime is best defined this way: "If an event happens that is not handled within x milliseconds, things will blow up -- sometimes literally.") |
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#13
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#14
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did you run defrag on the files at any time they were dormat?
dale |
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