Audio recording fails

[Elizabeth A]

I'm running an experiment in which participants read aloud a text stimulus. Their vocal responses are captured by a microphone. The loop contains 24 stimuli. As expected, the data generated from the experiment includes 24 wav files. However, about half of the files are empty, or the recording has ended before the speaker finishes talking. Most of these audio fails occur in the middle of the experiment, but not consistently on the same items.

I have tried building the experiment from scratch in Builder view by downloading the standalone Windows package for PsychoPy version 1.83 and 1.82, on an old XP laptop and on Windows 7 - all with the same result.

It's been suggested this could be a memory problem, as the laptops are 64-bit systems. Any recommendations for things to check / fix?

Thanks in advance.

[Daniel Riggs]

It's hard to help with this with so little information to go on. Are any error messages generated? PsychoPy generates log files, have you looked at them? After running an experiment in builder, it displays a console window that should include any system error messages. Does anything appear there?

If you're worried about memory, you could tell us how much RAM your computers have and give more specifics about your system. 64-bit computers generally offer more possibilities for handling large amounts of memory, so I wouldn't think the fact that it's 64 bit would cause problems, though I'm not an expert in the area (by the way, the processor (64 vs 32 bit) and the memory (RAM) are two separate things, in case you weren't sure).

Hopefully you'll get a better response if you can include more information that will help people think of potential causes of the problem. Take care,