recording wavs

[Michael Hipp]

Squabsy wrote:
> Having spent the weekend playing around with it  and using TOP to see
> what's going on I have come to the conclusion that all the Linux
> softwares I have been trying are indeed storing the file up in RAM then
> in my swap partition then hanging when it gets full.
> The Windows software I use on the other hand (CDWAVE) writes the file
> straight to disk with no temporary files.
> 
> I have 256k ram and a swap partition of 512mb I can't seem to be able to
> (nor do I think it's a particularly good idea) increase the size of my
> swap partition.
> 
> Is the only way I can have more success then increase the RAM ? or is
> there a Linux program that writes straight to disk ?
> Even if I click the straight to disk option in audacity it still fills my
> ram/swap partition

What version of Audacity are you using?

Last night at church, as a trial run, I recorded our entire service 
(16-bit stereo 44100 Hz). The resulting aup files came to 733.5MB for 
about 1 hour 12 minutes of audio. The exported WAV is 716.6MB.

I'm using Audacity 1.2.0-pre1. I tried the stable binaries but never 
could get them to run on any of my Red Hat 9 boxes after a few hours 
burnt attempting (in futility) to resolve dependency problems. Anyway, I 
downloaded and compiled the Audacity and wxWindows sources and it runs 
great, tho some features don't yet work.

I have 256M in this PII-233 box. While the recording was taking place, 
memory usage stayed at 250M with a small slice of swap being used. It 
never increased. (I'm running this in the latest version of apt-get 
kde-redhat, oink, oink). Audacity says it's storing its temporary files 
in /tmp/audacity1.2-username per File -> Preferences -> Directories. And 
it can presumably be changed to anyplace you have sufficient space. On 
the screen it was telling me that I had up to something like 4.5 hours 
of recording time available which works out to about the amount of disk 
space available in the / partition (2.5GB) per the above file sizes.

I too would prefer some lean-and-mean app that would just record the 
audio straight to disk as a WAV and then later pull it into something 
sophisticated like Audacity for manipulation. I'm still looking, but 
Audacity actually seems to work pretty well.

Hope this helps,
Michael Hipp