music troubles?

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

okay this is a long one so get your cup of coffee first.

1. windows xp computer dell dimension 8200 768 mb's ram
pent 4.
2. windows xp computer lenovo, dual core 1gb ram
pent 4.
3. windows xp computer me? i put it together. shuttle mb.
amd cpu, 1.5 ghz ? 1 gb ram.

4 windows 98 gold version on mb with isa slots one blown cap..
about 300 mb's of ram maybe 250 mb's? pent 2 266hrz cpu.

that is what i have here.

now for the trouble.
i rip songs from a cdrom that is a concert cdrom the songs were cut in to single tracks for the cdrom but when played there is no gap so it sounds like a concert.

well i put them back to one file in the wav editor so i can have one long concert when not playing the cdrom.

this is all fine and good. if the concert is only 20 to 30 minutes long, the numbers 1,2, & 3 for the computers above can handle it but the 30 minute one is only on the iffy the computer wants to handle it.

now if the concert is over 30 minutes or hours long the same 3 computer systems above can not handle merging the songs in to one if the song files are longer then 30 minutes, they just wont merge it i get an out of ram error or the wav editors crash with no error alert.
the sound blaster live cards bundled wav studio editor,
the audiomatrix editor,
and the Wavosau editor all crash on those computers.

number 4 above has no trouble with any of that except the audiomatrix editor will crash on it also. that is the only thing that is the same on all four of them. the audiomatrix can not handle more then 20 minute long wav files.

so my question is what is the reason the newer os's with the larger amount of ram and bigger cpu's and faster hd's, are not able to handle the over 30 minute long wav files.

but that little old win98 computer with the pent two and small amount of ram.
can handle merging wave files up to unknown time lenghts? last one done was merged an 30 minute long file with an 40 minute long file to make the finished concert one complete file again.

its the smaller computer it should be the one tha chokes on that size of files. but its the new faster bigger units that choke? it really po's Mad

me because i was wanting to use the bigger faster computers so i don't have to spend all day on that 266hrz cpu, now i have it up to 333 hrz but that is only a litte faster. and the 266 hrz cpu did handle the large files also.

so its got to be the Os system that is causing the trouble but i don't know so does any one else? Confused

techdunce · Joined: Mar 29, 2007 Posts: 188

Hello, Ive been having some cd/dvd trouble of my own lately, but during some heavy googling to find solutions, I remembered seeing this:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/bott_03september16.mspx

About half way down, theres a small tutorial about merging music files, and a link to a Nero plugin needed, its good for Windows Media Player 9 or higher. hope this helps, Techdunce Smile

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 1242

My first thought is, how much free disk space do you have & what is the max size of your swap files? There MAY not be enough room for them to work in.

Werebo · Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2008 12:52 pm Post subject:

Baby_Tux beat me with that post, it's exactly what crossed my mind too.

Alternatively, have you tried using the free 'Audacity' editor? It's available from here

I reckon it's about the best audio editor going, being freeware aside. To merge tracks, the easiest way is to simply load 1 track, select all, then copy to clipboard, open 2nd track, insert your silence at the end, if needed, then paste the 1st track in - Job done in less than 1 minute. Output/export to various formats, but if you want to save as .MP3, you'll need the 'Lame Encoder' (Free from somewhere on Google's 1st page Wink

)

You can use the same method to reduce a long album file to single tracks, too.

While I'm 'plugging' it, there's a load of other useful tools and filters to play with, too. i.e. - boosting the bass frequencies (great for improving stuff copied off the radio), 'normalising' - this 'lifts' the quiet passages to near the louder, so you don't get granny jumping out of her socks when the loud bits come in. And much much more. The whole install takes about 12 Mb on my PC, and a fair bit of that is unused language files - so it's nice 'n' light on the memory.

silmaril8n · Joined: Jan 29, 2004 Posts: 1743 Location: Phoenix, AZ

Ditto on Audacity and checking swap. Graphics, video, and audio editing are all tasks that are going to heavily rely on swap.

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 1242

I know what is going to be the puzzlement here. Why is the lesser machine working better than the one with 1G of memory. - Answer, its not so much the swap file or memory as it is an issue with amount of disk space to create a swap if needed. I would bet that is you look, you will find that that lowly machine actually has more free disk space & thus can handle the task. If not enough space, it is the same as NO MEMORY AT ALL & things will come to a grinding halt. - have that on my LINUX when I do videos. No fun clearing disk space (tmp files) & starting over.

I will also add my two cents in for the AUDACITY - I use it on M$ as well as LINUX.

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

i thought i said the swap file? it must have been in an email to another person since i did not post in this thread. sorry Sad

but the swap files are all fixed at 2000? or 3000? mb's on the xp computers.

and is fixed at 1250 on the win98 gold. there is no adjustment on the size it is fixed no more hen 1250 mb's allowed for it to use? so that is what really is strange,

the way i merge files is the way you all say, i copy the whole file and paste it on the end of the first file then save it then go to the next part of the concert to do it. the xp's can not even open two 30 minute files and copy one of them. i have to open one copy it then close it then open the file i want to paste it too. other wise the program crashes before i even get to try and paste it.

that last concert i did was a wav file the size of 1.3 gb's and the old win98 on that fixed swap file size handled it, nothing else would.
strange it is i know but that is what happens. makes me want to trash something.

oh the hd's are 80 gb's in size on the xp's with 30 to 45 % free space on two of them the other is an 160 gb's hd, with 70% freespace.

thanks for the heads up on Audacity werebo but i don't like the way that works it has some quriks to it that i don't like i've tried it and it is on my little sisters computer cause she likes it. but i don't and it more likely won't work either in these xp computers.

i just don't understand why it works this way here i've got the computers tweaked the way they should be for best working systems and all that so it should be lightining fast here on the xp systems but its not its slow even when i have it set in high prioity and it still crashes. Sad

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 1242

Curious, how big are each the files you are working with?

This IS a puzzler, but I'm gonna think (& sleep) on this one & MAYBE something will click.

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

the size of the files does not matter its the time length limit.

one song can have a time limit like 45 minutes for one song and the program wont handle its wav format.

now i know you are thinking nothing is that long.? well i am not sure just how long it was but the original concert version of Hey Jude was very long i think it was about 40 or 35 minutes long.

but it would not work in wav format either.

the normal songs are all 2 to 7 minutes long you know how concerts are all the same they mess with the studio versions of the songs. but taking each track starting with 1 and pasting the others in order on the end of each previous track will work only up to 25 to 30 minutes on the xp computers.

the win 98 can go the whole concert but it does get slower around 30 minutes so i stop and start the second half then i past both halfs to one which works faster then just the single tracks being pasted after the 30 minutes length. but that is only on the win 98.

these xp computer will crash if i try to go longer with the pasting of single tracks past the 25 or 30 minute mark.

so the track size's variey in size from 10 mbs to 50 mb's
but the total amount for the 25 or 30 minute limit is about
300 to 500 mb's its never the same you know cause of the different songs.

all this is the reason i think m$ has done something to limit the os's useability in this merging audio files.

i can edit video and graphics just fine the video never crashes and the graphics i use a ram cleaner that seems to help but i never use that big of graphics so that does not crash, it is windows picture it that has a memory leak which makes it crash on large files if i don't use the ram cleaner. but the other image editors don't need the ram cleaner.

Werebo

??? You're ending up with a 300-500Mb file for about 30 minutes of music???

What sample rate are you using, cos that is a massive file for the contents - I've a lot of 1-hour (+/- 5 mins) concerts and they come out to about 55-60Mb at 128Kb/s ('standard' CD quality).

If possible, try lowering the sample-rate to 128kb/s-192kb/s - that should lower the memory overhead drastically. Any more than192Kb/s is a waste, as your ears won't notice any difference or improvement in the sound quality.

pcrattail · Joined: Jun 11, 2004 Posts: 406

OKY DOKY

YOU stated that the 3 XP machines have 80gig Drives in them.
YOU stated that the 2 XP machines have about 40% free space.
YOU stated that the 1 98 machine has a 160gig with 80% free space.

THERE IN lies YOUR answer.

YOU have MORE free space on the 160 than any of the 80.
Windows is calculation PERCENTAGE of SPACE Available.
Even if it is a FIXED swap, Windows is calculating for it.

There used to be a FIX for it in 9x by adding to the "Buffers" line in
the .... config.sys file. Now if that still WORKS for XP, I don't know.

What is happening, is that as you are working on the file, it has to take up "memory buffers". Windows sets them to a certain amount. Most of the time you don't need extra. BUT....... In your case, you are working with a much "larger" "holding" area.

Check also STACKS...... forgot which is which.

techdunce · Joined: Mar 29, 2007 Posts: 188

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 1242

Pcrattail just confirmed what I was saying & thinking. (he did the math - beating me to it - & I'll assume it is correct) To add to that, when you do things like what you are doing (& thus my question on size) you are using TEMP files to do it. So, you NEED DISK SPACE to do it or physical memory out the wazoo (usually greater than 2G) So even though time is important in what you are doing, file size is too. And the more temp files you have going, the quicker it is used up. That is what I was saying in my post about the video in linux. I would have to clear all the tmp files to have enough disk space to create more. Although it wouldn't crash per say, it WOULD error & screw up what I was doing.

Also, what he was saying on STACKS - there is (or at least USED TO BE) ONE at least (can't recall which one) that actually fills from the ends on toward the middle. When it reaches the middle it crashes. Why they designed it this way, I'll probably never know. But in a nutshell, YES, M$ DOES have limits set.- BTW: Have you ever played with the old audio recorder that is built in (especially in 95) it had a VERY limited record time. Almost worthless.

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

sorry pcratail.

wrong,

again its my fault for mis typing that. i said 160 gbs but i meant that was the 3rd xp computer i said nothing about what the win 98 has on it. sorry

the win 98 gold has 5 hd's c, d, e, f, g.
on raid card.
c is programs only. hd, 13gb's
d. is temp folders and swap file hd, 6 gb's
e,f and g are music storage only. hd's 20 and 40 gb's

yes i do have stacks tweaked also, thanks for the mention of that.

on the 98 i have up'ed them to something like 24 or 28 spare stacks.

i can't seem to find a way to do that on xp computers? i wonder if that is the trouble? Confused

the size werebo is wav format size, i use wav editors.
thus the 1.3 gb size of the previous mentioned concert file it was wav format.

okay techdunce i'll check it out to see how to use it?,

yes baby tux i knew what you meant by the video stuff.
the old recorder from win 95 is limited only by your ram limit (as far as i can tell anyway ) because i used it before you can make it as long as you have unused ram, i got it up to 20 minutes or more on the large computers. now you wonder what the .. did i do. simple make a blank recording file in it. while your recording keep decresing the speed until you get it as long as you want then when stopped just drag the seek bar thumb back to the start of the blank file. now you want to record over the blank file you got which is as long as you want,
then just save it as a wav file the save window has an option button to allow you to change the file to what format and settings you want it saved as.

Cool

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 1242

Been there & done that on the recorder - I was mostly referring to "out of the box" & just trying to make a point on M$ limiting stuff.

Do know that when they went from a 9X platform to the NT (XP) platform things changed dramatically, so doubt if you can do the same tweaks as before. If by chance you can, it most likely won't be the same way.

Well, this is still got me, but I am still giving it an educated guess that it has something to do with the way XP handles its files - be it temp, buffer, swap or whatever vs space to do it. - be it RAM or HD. (I'll be the 1st to admit, I could be wrong & probably am) - Quite frankly, I'm out of ideas at this point. So, gonna hang loose & see what develops.

Well, here's hoping you find the answer so we all can know for sure. - whether I'm right OR WRONG - doesn't really matter, it's the answer being found that does.
BEST WISHES...

pcrattail · Joined: Jun 11, 2004 Posts: 406

Once you clarified the drives for me, it made "some" of my statements false.

I agree.... it is still in the way XP handles "open"/ "temp" files.

THIS is straight from Microsoft. Did you try it??
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126962/

Post back..... any things you try.
Thanks

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

i have bookmarked that page.

but the number 512 sends signals to me that it is changing the size the defragment section units need to be. is that what it is doing or is this something else here.

thanks for finding that database article i looked on there but was not able to find what i needed for this out of memory alert.

i must not have the magic touch on that site,? Rolling Eyes

edited in.

oh yeah the page file is normaly around 4 to 7 hundred on this xp. but the other day i checked the task manager to see what was using the cpu cycles, and i saw the page file use was 1.75 gb's Shocked

the statement you said it would figure what it wanted even with a fixed size, came to mind and so i now have the page files on all the hd's in this xp dell being controlled by the system,
since it was ignoring me anyway. Sad

rovingcowboy · Joined: Jan 26, 2003 Posts: 1515

having troubles pcratial.
every time i click on start then run and type in regedit then click okay i get an alert saying the program can not run because it can't find file acui.dll and maybe reinstall the program will fix it,

but the file is in three locations on the computer one in system files folder in windows folder. the other in i386 folder, and one in the i386 archive file
so what is making it say the regedit cant run?

i'm going to try getting a copy of registry editor and see if a third party one will work. Confused

got an 3rd party program to let me in the registry,
but the value of zzz number is 512 already so upping it won't work.

and the no dll file trouble is not related to this wav editing trouble i know that because i got in to the registry last week. and this wav editing trouble has been going on for over a year or more its just driving me nuts since i can't seem to find the fix for so thats why i asked in this forum.

as for this dll troubles. it keeps asking me to reinstall from the cdrom used to install xp pro, so i put it in and it says the cd is not the right one? strange so it is, but i think it has something to do with the trojan i got last week and got rid of it. the same trojan removed all the dun and tapi dll files also. i did not know it removed other ones.?

pcrattail · Joined: Jun 11, 2004 Posts: 406

rovingcowboy,

Yep, they can infect and kill any file.

You may have to do a "search" on the CD to find the dll file (normally stuck in one of those "stupid" .cab files).

Once you find the file, "extract" it, and make a little home for it on your PC (I normally stick it with the other windows dll files).

Now, re-register it.

Here is a link to instructions on "re-registering" any dll file.

http://pcworld.about.com/magazine/2408p126id126116.htm

Good Luck, and Happy Motoring LOL