Re: [Audacity-devel] Hold recorded data in memory until recording is stoped

[Gale A. <ga...@au...>]

| From Markus Meyer <me...@me...> 
| Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:59:23 +0200
| Subject: [Audacity-devel] Hold recorded data in memory until recording is stoped
> Gale Andrews schrieb:
> My point was not to put the blame on anyone but just to say that the 
> preference is currently named incorrectly because it suggests something 
> which is not entirely correct.

Hi Markus 

True the wording is wrong for the current behaviour. But I still have
reservations about going back to the original "Always hold all audio 
data in memory" because of its incorrect implication that disc 
writing is not done. If the current behaviour has to stay as is for the 
time being, what would be a better wording? If I've grasped it, it
seems there are three different duplication behaviours (by which I
mean writing to identical content to disc as well as to RAM):

* recording (entire content duplicated to disc after recording),
* importing (entire content duplicated to disc unless reading direct 
   from uncompressed files) (I know we could change to cache
   aliasfiles as well)
* editing a saved project (nothing written to disc until the project is 
   modified)

So the wording could be something like "read/write audio data 
using RAM as well as disc" (messy/not fully accurate?) or more 
simply "play/record using RAM (useful for slow drives, but could 
crash when importing large files or projects)". I know the parenthesis
makes it wordy, but it's a simple way of giving the warning for now.
And I think there is far less implication that there won't be disc
writing.        

> > Might it be an idea to give the user an option to enable caching 
> > for only recording? 
> >   
> I agree that it would make sense to separate this into two things, say 
> option (1) "Wait with writing data to disk until recording stopped" 
>  and 
> option (2) "Hold all audio in memory (helps when projects are stored on 
> slow disks)" or something like that. Additionally, Dominic suggested in 
> 2006 that we could add an additional preference for option (2) which 
> says "Limit audio data held in memory to [...] megabytes", which would 
> prevent some crashes at least. However, at the moment I don't have time 
> to dig into the code and do either of those changes.

As regards the wording of (1) I think that implies the RAM is released 
when recording is finished. Unless I am missing something, I don't 
really see the point of holding on to the cache once recording is 
finished. It just seems to make a crash increasingly likely once 
a user starts making a lengthy series of edits to the recording,
because cache is still being added to all the time.        


Thanks

Gale