Anyone familiar with the audio editor/recorder application Audacity? [View all]

[Syrinx]

I was using it last night to record the radio broadcast of the BCS championship game.

And I lost a good chunk of it (about six minutes or so, via the game clock), because the program seemed to spring a serious memory leak.

I did a dry-run a few days ago, just to make sure everything would work. I jacked my radio into my soundcard, tuned to the specific radio station, and recorded well over four hours of audio. The resulting WAV file was quite big, almost 3 GB, but it worked perfectly.

I did a software upgrade in the meantime (Linux Mint), but I'm not sure if Audacity was one of the programs updated.

When I noticed that Audacity had crashed, I did a "free" command, and saw that I was almost out of actual RAM, though my swap still had a lot of room.

I rebooted, and ran nothing but a terminal and Audacity. Except, of course, all the stuff that Linux Mint runs automatically, most of which I probably don't need.

I managed to get the rest of the game recorded, but it wasn't particularly easy.

I wish I had specific numbers to report, but I was busy trying to actually watch the game on ESPN.

But it seems like my RAM was being eat up at roughly the same rate that Audacity's temp "au" files were filling my "/tmp" directory.

I only have 2GB of RAM, which is pretty small by today's standards, but I can't think of any legitimate reason that recording audio should exhaust RAM like that. I had nearly a TB of free disk space.

I just checked my version of Audacity, and it says 1.3.13-beta. I'm not sure why Mint/Ubuntu would use beta software.

Anyone have any info on this problem? I could probably explain it better if I hadn't been up all night celebrating the outcome of the ball game.

BTW, if anyone has the Eli Gold broadcast from the late first quarter into the early second quarter, I would really appreciate that.

Thanks.