Re: [Audacity-devel] Network file hassles in Windows; tick/pop filtering

[Dave F. <dav...@co...>]

On Tuesday 03 February 2004 05:56 am, Joe Krahn wrote:
> Dominic Mazzoni wrote:
> > Joe Krahn wrote:
> >> I'm trying to record audio to a network mapped drive, and
> >> get occasional errors that stop a recording. Anyone else
> >> had this trouble?
> >
> > I'm not sure what's causing the recording to stop, but I'm
> > not surprised that you had trouble.  That requires a lot of
> > bandwidth.
>
> With 100BT and just two computers, network bandwidth is not
> a problem. I have done things like burn to CD from a
> network ISO, no problems. Maybe a large number of small
> files just has a bit too much overhead in Windows. If I could
> increase the chunk size, I think the problem would go away.

100BaseT isn't as fast as you might think, especially with the SMB protocol 
slapped onto it.  SMB is *slow*.  I ran Audacity over NFS for awhile and had 
some pretty poor results.  When it comes down to it, 100BT with SMB isn't 
even as fast as a mode 2 hard drive.  Just keep in mind that your bottleneck 
likely isn't the 100BT, it's the SMB.  If either of your computers has < 
600mhz processors, then SMB is most likely your bottleneck rather than the 
ethernet itself.  At least, that's been my experience.  ;)

You're better off either recording locally, or doing as dominic suggested and 
recorded to mp3 directly.  If you're willing to run Linux, ecasound will do 
this thing for you perfectly.  Under Windows, believe it or not but I'd try 
MPlayer with it.  But if you can at least get a console app that'll take the 
line in and pump it to stdout, you should be able to pipe the song into lame 
or oggenc, both of which are readily available.  (Naturally I'd suggest ogg, 
especially with Josh's lossless ogg editing project going, if you want to 
edit it later)

Still, I'm curious what happens when you increase the block size.  Isn't that 
in the preferences now?  I recall it used to be a #define in audacity.h, 
right?  Anyway, I'm curious what happens because if you increase the block 
size, you stand an outside chance of getting Windows to cache the file for 
you until you write it.  No promises, and it depends very much on what 
libsndfile and audacity themselves do during recording, but I'm curious.  Of 
course, if it's going to do that, it should already be doing that, but if 
your files are small enough, then SMB could be overloading just because of 
all the files getting thrown at it.

Oh yeah, finally, SMB is *not* a reliable protocol.  It's supposed to be, but 
it's not.  :(  The most common problem I've encountered is when the client 
machine copies the whole file and thinks it copied it, and the server machine 
comes back with "Nope, you didn't copy it" but the client machine has already 
deleted it.  Happens when you try to move too much at one time.

Dave

> ...
>
> > I'd recommend that you find a program that records directly
> > to MP3 (or Ogg if possible), because that way the encoding is
> > happening on the local CPU, and much less audio data has to
> > go over the network.
>
> I thought it would be nice to grab out some individual song
> segments, but perhaps editing many hours of data is just too
> unwieldy. OTOH, I have the source code...
>
> Joe Krahn
>
>
>
>
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