Crashes when working with large MP3 / WAV files

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williamt
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Apr 10, 2009 1:06 pm

Crashes when working with large MP3 / WAV files

Post by williamt »

Hello,

I've been trying Amadeus Pro (v 1.4) for a day. Its nice - having recently been a PC user I was looking for something as close of as possible to Cooledit - but I'm having a lot of problems working with large files.

Specifically I need to deal with speech-only audio files (MP3, sometimes wav) which may be anything up to 7 or 8 hours long (though the MP3s are usually encoded at 64KB/s rather than say 192.)

I'm finding, that, for example, Amadeus will spent 5 minutes loading a 100MB MP3 file then crash just as it reaches the end, typically with a crash report beginning like this:
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x0000000000000004
Crashed Thread: 9
(I shan't paste the whole thing here..)

Also, a WAV file that was saved in Adobe Soundbooth will fail right at the start - with 'This does not appear to be a valid WAV file' - when the same one will load fine in Audacity.

Any suggestions?

In fairness, this problem isn't exclusive to Amadeus - occasionally Audacity will randomly crash as well.

I'm running this on an Intel iMac with Leopard 10.5.6 and 2GB RAM (which I accept needs to be upgraded to 4GB sooner or later) - I've experimented with the amount of memory allowed in the Amadeus preferences - from 256MB to 1024 and back down again.

Thanks,
William

williamt
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Apr 10, 2009 1:06 pm

Post by williamt »

Some more information following some tests I've done....

Firstly, this paticular audio is being recorded on a Tascam DR-1 digital recorder, which is then connected to the Mac via USB and the files copied directly across.

An example of a file that's just failed - 150 MB total file size, 2 channel (stereo) 64KB/s MP3 (sample rate 44.1) - ie. some five and a half hours worth. Amadeus will take a couple of minutes to load this in, then, just as its about to, will quit. I can however load the file in Audacity, save it as a much larger WAV (1.6 GB), and then load that into Amadeus without problem. (I suspect my next step will be to record the whole day's audio - some cricket commentary - direct to WAV and try to load that in.)

I did also wonder if the MP3 bitrate I'd chosen was the problem - I recorded several very brief (30 second) clips at 32, 64, 96, 128, 192 and 256 KB/s on the Tascam, then loaded them in, and they all worked - but they were all very brief.

Would be interested to know what happens with memory usage etc. when you load an MP3 compared to a WAV.

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