Archive, 3/10/2009 Hour 3 is cut off
 

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news again...

-Joe

It will continue to happen almost every day. KC reboots when he gets in and sees that the system 'skipped' during the loading process at night. The program that downloads the three hours starts to struggle as it gets close to full. Short of finding an entirely new program system, there is nothing else to do but re-set when KC can watch it download.

He is going to see if there has ben an update to the program that we use for this on podcast and archives. This system has been an improvement on the old system. We believe that if we were to trim the archives way back, this wouldn't happen the way it does. Currently they go back a year. Most shows like this archive for perhaps a month or three months...

Computer suggestions
 

Steve, I'm actually very adept at the use of computers. It sounds to me like the machine may be limited in the amount of onboard RAM that it has available. Unless the disk space is actually full, I wouldn't think that it should be limited by the amount of archives you have stored on a hard drive.

I'm assuming that you guys are doing some transcoding and subsequent compression into the mp3 format, which would tend to be a memory intensive operation, particularly because each clip is a 1 hour track when you ultimately post it.

Windows XP has a physical limit of about 3.5 gigabytes of RAM, so you are safe putting in about 4 GB. If you guys are currently memory-limited, this might help.

If memory addition is not an option or if you are already at the max, you might want to try experimenting with dividing the raw audio track before transcoding and compressing. In this way, the memory load at any one time can be reduced and should result in increased performance of the system, where you don't reach a limit or where it would take programs much longer than 3 hours in order to run into a problem. Then you can use a program to re-merge them back into the hour long tracks. A batch file can be used to automate this so KC doesn't have to slave over the process once you determine what works.

Joey..

Thx.. I'll have KC look at this but I know you're on the right track. I've heard discussion of the size factor of the files and talk of splitting things into six 30 minute segments, etc.

KC will update this today with the info..