Recordings have gaps not present on original

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Bull
Posts: 42
Joined: Tue Jun 08, 2010 5:49 pm
Location: Blacksburg, Virginia

Recordings have gaps not present on original

Post by Bull »

Hi,
I'm an inveterate listener of Audible.com audio books. I download my purchases to my computer, and then record and reformat them to short chunks of .m4a for use on an iPod Shuffle. Playing the Audible .aa file on the Shuffle is a problem, since inadvertently hitting the 'Back' button takes me back to the beginning of the file, possibly many hours, with no easy way to find my way back to my last position. With short chunks (~2 minutes long) I never go too far back. This copying and reformatting is probably contrary to the fine print, but since I am the sole user of the product, and I paid for the original, I don't feel bad at all about it.

Basically I play the .aa format in iTunes and route the sound from iTunes to Amadeus pro using Jack. I let the entire file play in the background, then save the .amad file and do a little post-processing to insert markers at periods of silence about two minutes apart, then split to .m4a according to these markers. This has worked fine for several years and hundreds of audio books.

Lately, however, the end result has glitches in the audio, each of a few seconds of missing content. There's no silence there, just one sentence stops abruptly and is immediately followed in the middle of a slightly later dialog. This hiccup is not present in the original .aa file.

Does this sound like something Audible.com is doing to discourage me? I've never heard of a technology that lets playback continue normally but that places glitches in any recording, but I suppose anything is possible. Isn't the sound out of iTunes just digital sound? Could something be in the stream that causes Amadeus Pro to mis-process it?

Thanks for any advice,
WD in Blacksburg

Bull
Posts: 42
Joined: Tue Jun 08, 2010 5:49 pm
Location: Blacksburg, Virginia

Post by Bull »

Answering my own question, I believe the problem was that Amadeus Pro was pausing during recording when communications with the external drive used for Temp Files were bogged down. Perhaps slow transfer rates, or full buffers.

In any event I changed the disk to be used for Temp files to a different one, and the problem disappeared.

I'd be happy to explain my troubleshooting steps that led me to this solution if anyone is interested.

If I am right, my only problem is why AP didn't notify me that it was having trouble writing Temp files.

Bull

PS AP Preferences were set to use the disk with the most free space, but it was not. There was another drive with more space. I over-rode the selection and chose the one with more space, and that's what fixed it.

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