Nov 08 2008
Audacity kept shutting down
This is one of those “It’s been a long week and I don’t need this” stories.
I had been pushing time a bit this week to get an edition of Portable Radio Point of View out in time for Remembrance Day. The students had done some really good reflecting on the topic and so I needed to get this podcast done and done now before it became “old news”.
I decided to work on my Asus Eee PC 4G computer to do the edit. Things seemed to be going well but all of a sudden I would get a friendly message telling me that Audacity was sorry but it would have to close. AAAARGH!!! Of course I hadn’t been regularly saving the work I was doing.
Start again…this time saved work, often. Again part way through the edit…Audacity was very sorry but it had to close.
I am a slow learner so it took a few of these before I clued in that I needed to alter the way that I was working. It seems that this was a memory issue. Once I started saving my work to the 8gb memory card instead of the little Asus, life improved and the work got done.
Anyway, if this sounds familiar to you you could be experiencing a memory issue. I know that I am. Did I also mention that I lost my car keys two weeks ago. Put them down somewhere and….
P.S. I think it is a really good episode of Portable Radio. Take a listen at portableradio.ca
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Lesson learned. If you are going to use a mini-laptop like the one from Asus make sure you’ve added some memory to it. That’s why we added the 8GB memory card to ours. Of course, the next challenge is to remember you have it when you’re in the thick of it with the students. Jane and I aim to make all the mistakes for you, so you don’t have to.
You might run into this when students are working in a lab setting as well. If students are logged in to use their own accounts, memory quickly becomes an issue as Audacity often uses more than what the students are allocated. Be aware of it, train students to delete previous projects. You might even consider investing in a handful of USB flash drives. I’m considering this since prices have really dropped. Maybe even a set of 30. 1GB USB drives should be enough. Of course, managing all of that stuff might be more trouble than it’s worth.
Food for thought.
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