Saving while recording

Details for Saving a selection while recording from the Other recording enhancements section of Feature Requests:

This feature was found in CoolEdit (Audition) and is very useful for doing post-processing in advance of the end of a long time recording. With this feature, for example, while a long speech or live music performance is being recorded by the program, one can save a selection of the recorded audio (e.g. a 30-min clip or one song of the performance) as wav file or MP3 file.

This feature has many advantages. First, the selection can be saved as a file that can be examined in advance of the end of the recording. Second, some editing for it can be performed with another instance of the program. This enables editing and post-processing of the selection in advance of the end of the recording while the recording still continues. Therefore, the user can examine the result of the recording in advance or post-process the recording piece by piece in advance. This feature would be very helpful and important if it is required for getting the post-processed version of recording very soon after the recording (e.g. after a speech is finished).

Andy Latham wrote: One potential problem: Audacity needs almost constant access to your hard drive while recording. This is (presumably) a way to get around needing huge amounts of RAM. Interrupting it in order to write new files is a dangerous proposition, though I suppose Audacity could just allocate a much larger buffer of RAM to store data in temporarily while it's recording.

Richard Ash wrote: The HDD issues can be dealt with if enough system resources are available by running the edit at a lower priority. The problem is that the audacity project management code isn't fully thread safe, and it would have to be to make this work. Making it thread safe is a difficult, skilled and tedious job, so it's not one anybody has volunteered to do yet. Until machines with enough grunt to make multiple sessions active at once feasible become common (mine would certainly struggle), it's not going to be a priority for the current team.