It’s not fair to make silly excuses for not showing up routinely with something that’s supposed be made weekly. For us, it’s been our podcast. If I can’t produce a podcast for one week, I usually just wait until next production week and make up for it with content. No excuses made. Besides, this is all in good fun.

But goddamit. Just a few minutes ago while editing the audio file in Audacity Beta 1.3.2, it crashes hard on me after a simple edit. In my case it was deleting less than a second of noise. Audacity crashes on me and loses all of my progress. I boot the software back up with hopes of trying to salvage. It pops up a dialogue box that says I can try to recover the progress that it supposedly could bring back. When I click on the button to recover the data, the dialogue disappears and nothing happens.

“Isn’t there supposed to be two tracks with my audio?”

Yes. There was supposed to be. Nothing. Didn’t even have my audio backed up in the supposed cache directory that is supposed to be hidden away should I need it.

Good for nothing piece of shit free software. Now I think I understand why someone would pay for software that’s been tested and had it pass through QA before this shit gets into a users hands.

I’m angry. Not for the software itself, but the fact that I have no recourse to recover anything. Shows what I get for trying to use free software to do something for me. I’m almost willing to shell out money for some REAL recording software. The guys who are working on Audacity.. well, what can I say? I don’t hate them directly, but giving me a crappy data recovery solution that is worse than their previous recovery software is the pits.

All in all, this is just me being angry. So what’s the purpose of you reading this post? Informative I hope.

Do NOT use Audacity (whether it’s the stable or beta build, both crash randomly) on a PC/Laptop with other shit on it. Just get a cheap laptop, burn the bloatware, and devote it’s purpose only for recording audio and nothing else. Don’t install other software on it, other than keeping your audio drivers and your audio software up to date. And stay away from beta software if all you want is something to record with. Or if all you’re doing with it is actually testing it out for the good people who made the software you’re using. Interestingly enough, this can still apply to all of the gamers out there that play an open/closed beta stage of a game, and complain about how buggy a game is when its released.

This was a painful lesson. This is the second week without a proper podcast recorded. Not only that, but now I have to bust my ass to re-write another agenda containing three weeks worth of podcasting and try to shove that into less than 2-hours (preferably one) of listenable ramblings. UGH.

I need to watch some Sora no Woto.

Image drawn by b.k. (artist’s webpage)

-maserbeam