Help me troubleshoot my recording.

[Avuton Olrich]

Hello,

 I record Sirius Satellite Radio daily 24 hours / 7 days a week over
optical toslink cable. I've been doing this for over 2 years now.

 About 2 months ago my recordings started failing, in the range of 7
to 24 hours. At the end it sounds like the stream gets corrupted.
After the corruption anything I try to rip from this raw files is all
blank (or maybe it's quit recording completely). I have attached a
link[1] to a sample of when it goes bad (less than 1MB in FLAC). It
seems most obviously a ALSA problem, but I'm not sure. This problem
started on 6-8-2008, though nothing obvious appears in my logs as to
why this started happening then. No strange ecasound output appears
before this happens.

My execution line is:
ecasound -r -i alsa,hw:Audigy2 -z:db,1000000 -z:intbuf -o
/realtime/2008-08-18/blah.raw
It was this way since before this started happening.

This is reproducable with ecasound 2.4 and 2.5

[1] http://avuton.googlepages.com/end.flac
--
avuton
--
 "I've got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell." --
Christopher Walken

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[Avuton Olrich]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 8:13 PM, Avuton Olrich <avuton@...> wrote:

> Hello,
>
>  I record Sirius Satellite Radio daily 24 hours / 7 days a week over
> optical toslink cable. I've been doing this for over 2 years now.
>
>  About 2 months ago my recordings started failing, in the range of 7
> to 24 hours. At the end it sounds like the stream gets corrupted.
> After the corruption anything I try to rip from this raw files is all
> blank (or maybe it's quit recording completely). I have attached a
> link[1] to a sample of when it goes bad (less than 1MB in FLAC). It
> seems most obviously a ALSA problem, but I'm not sure. This problem
> started on 6-8-2008, though nothing obvious appears in my logs as to
> why this started happening then. No strange ecasound output appears
> before this happens.
>
> My execution line is:
> ecasound -r -i alsa,hw:Audigy2 -z:db,1000000 -z:intbuf -o
> /realtime/2008-08-18/blah.raw
> It was this way since before this started happening.
>
> This is reproducable with ecasound 2.4 and 2.5
>
> [1] http://avuton.googlepages.com/end.flac

Forgot to mention an important detail that after ecasound is restarted
things record correctly again 100% of the time. I usually reset
ecasound for recording every 24 hours at midnight PST, unless I find
out earlier that it has stopped recording (which happens >95% of the
time now).
--
avuton
--
 "I've got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell." --
Christopher Walken

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[Oliver Oli-3]

is the playtime of the file the expected time or is it shorter? i never
heard some corrupt file like this, but it sounds for me a little like
fast forwarding on a cd player. or the samples are just shuffled
around. the first thing i would try is recording from analog input and
see if that changes anything. if your problems disappear it's not
ecasound, could still be alsa, but most probably the problem is
outside of the computer. maybe:

- replace the optical cable
- try non-optical output, if you have coax (RCA) digital out
- test another receiver
- update firmware of receiver if thats possible

if it still happens with analog in, it's ecasound or alsa or
combination of both:
- try another recording software
- you could put jack before ecasound. this shouldn't make any
difference, but who knows

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 5:13 AM, Avuton Olrich <avuton@...> wrote:

> Hello,
>
>  I record Sirius Satellite Radio daily 24 hours / 7 days a week over
> optical toslink cable. I've been doing this for over 2 years now.
>
>  About 2 months ago my recordings started failing, in the range of 7
> to 24 hours. At the end it sounds like the stream gets corrupted.
> After the corruption anything I try to rip from this raw files is all
> blank (or maybe it's quit recording completely). I have attached a
> link[1] to a sample of when it goes bad (less than 1MB in FLAC). It
> seems most obviously a ALSA problem, but I'm not sure. This problem
> started on 6-8-2008, though nothing obvious appears in my logs as to
> why this started happening then. No strange ecasound output appears
> before this happens.
>
> My execution line is:
> ecasound -r -i alsa,hw:Audigy2 -z:db,1000000 -z:intbuf -o
> /realtime/2008-08-18/blah.raw
> It was this way since before this started happening.
>
> This is reproducable with ecasound 2.4 and 2.5
>
> [1] http://avuton.googlepages.com/end.flac
> --
> avuton
> --

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[Avuton Olrich]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 2:41 AM, Oliver Oli <oliver.oli+0815@...> wrote:

> is the playtime of the file the expected time or is it shorter? i never
> heard some corrupt file like this, but it sounds for me a little like
> fast forwarding on a cd player. or the samples are just shuffled
> around. the first thing i would try is recording from analog input and
> see if that changes anything. if your problems disappear it's not
> ecasound, could still be alsa, but most probably the problem is
> outside of the computer. maybe:
>
> - replace the optical cable
> - try non-optical output, if you have coax (RCA) digital out
> - test another receiver
> - update firmware of receiver if thats possible
>
> if it still happens with analog in, it's ecasound or alsa or
> combination of both:
> - try another recording software
> - you could put jack before ecasound. this shouldn't make any
> difference, but who knows

Yes, it is shorter than it is expected, after the day's raw recording
it goes to flac which completely ignores the rest of the raw file
after this point. Thanks for the great suggestions, I'll add these to
my troubleshooting 'todo' list for this weekend.
--
avuton
--
 "I've got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell." --
Christopher Walken

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[Oliver Oli-3]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Avuton Olrich <avuton@...> wrote:

> Yes, it is shorter than it is expected, after the day's raw recording
> it goes to flac which completely ignores the rest of the raw file
> after this point.

I don't understand this. Because if you recording it as a raw file or
open it as a raw file for reading, FLAC should read it from start to
end and encode everything what's in there. It's binary data anyway,
FLAC has no clue about the data, it would even encode a JPEG file.

Just to be sure we are talking about the same thing: When you encode
your raw audio file with flac and decode it back to raw (or WAV)
again, both files have different sizes? Thats sounds to me like a
corruption in the file system or a bad harddisk.

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[Avuton Olrich]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 6:29 AM, Oliver Oli <oliver.oli+0815@...> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Avuton Olrich <avuton@...> wrote:
>
>> Yes, it is shorter than it is expected, after the day's raw recording
>> it goes to flac which completely ignores the rest of the raw file
>> after this point.
>
> I don't understand this. Because if you recording it as a raw file or
> open it as a raw file for reading, FLAC should read it from start to
> end and encode everything what's in there. It's binary data anyway,
> FLAC has no clue about the data, it would even encode a JPEG file.

Maybe I'm technically wrong here. Maybe it flat stops recording. Next
time I can catch it messing up "in the act" I'll check to see if the
file size stops growing, though, it's difficult to tell.
--
avuton
--
 "I've got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell." --
Christopher Walken

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