Smoke14

Well, I'll take a shot at how forums like this are supposed to work and offer my $.02 worth on the problems and questions some of you have reported. I'm doing this as a new topic post because I want to get this out and I don't have the time right now to search through all the topics (again). Keep in mind that I am a user, not an author. (Who remembers Tron? Hands anyone?)

 

In my first extended session, I saw hints of what folks have talked about. Interestingly, I only saw the crash message on those times when I'd stepped away and the cassette had reached the end. Since I couldn't tell NCH what had happened, I restarted Golden Records and continued with my analog to digital archiving of my personal library. Overall, I would call my first extended session a success.

 

In any case, here are a couple of thoughts from someone who has been into music on several levels for a long time:

1) For me, and I suspect many others, we are working with cassette tapes that haven't been played, or rewound, for many years. It has been decades since I regularly played cassette tapes and ten or more years since a cassette deck had a place in my home entertainment set up. It wouldn't surprise me if a significant percentage of my cassette tapes haven't been played for a quarter century or more.

2) My cassette player has been in the same inadequate storage conditions as my cassette tapes and LPs. Trying to do something about saving my library is how I wound up getting to know about NCH, Golden Records, and these support forums.

 

So, given all that, and given the lesser quality of many factory made pre-recorded tapes, is it any surprise that some tapes stall out at times when they are played for the first time in 10 to 30 or 40 years? From what I've seen, the "crash" occurs when while in the active recording mode no music is detected for more than 2 seconds. (That's the on-screen message. To me it seems like at least a 5 second period before the "crash" or timeout occurs.)

 

The on-screen message calls it a crash. But is it really? My impression is that when playing old cassette tapes, some stall out is far from unheard of. If the stall occurs during a Golden Records session, the system senses this and ends the recording session. When that happens to me, I just restart from the stall point.

 

Thinking about using my cassette player for the first time in 10 to 15 years makes me shudder when I think of what I asked it to do. How many of us would expect a car to run perfectly if the ignition key hadn't been turned once in 15 years?

 

So, maybe at least some of the "stops recording" and "crash" problems can be explained by the quality and age of the tapes and tape playing equipment - and by NCH's Golden Records doing what it is programmed to do: shut down when no music is received for a period of time. One would think that TPB at NCH who monitor issues are already at work on a patch to have the session simply end when no music is received for a period of time instead of the current response of shutting down the whole program. As another poster said, it is an inconvenient problem; not a catastrophic one.

 

I wouldn't expect to have the same experience once I get to my LP record albums though.

Hi Erosman,

Thank You for your input. As far as the records go, I had the same problem with them. Also My tapes I am recording are tapes that have been used in the last year. These are accompianment tapes that we use for my choir.My machine is also newer-not new,but a good one .

But you do bring a good point to the table. My question then is why after some songs and not others?Is the time in between songs not uniform? SO many variables.

But you are right, TPB are working on a solution as we speak.

Just food for thought.

Carl

I too have encountered the same problem on my laptop running Vista. The latest version of the registered version of Golden Records (GR) normally crashes at the beginning of a recording, just after I have dropped the stylus in the blank area at the beginning of a vinyl LP track to be converted and I have pressed the "Record" button. GR then indicates that it is "Waiting For Audio" and the crash occurs before I see the "Recording" message from GR. I briefly see a message to submit a report to NCH Software, but then Vista takes over and indicates that it is closing the prograrm and that is it. I restart GR and I can normally record another two or three tracks before GR crashes again. I have also had a crash happen very infrequently at the end of a track when it is converting the resulting file; and like you, experienced that GR did properly convert the new .wav file, despite the "crash" when I relaunched GR.

 

I have personally attributed this to an "enhanced" Vista feature and I figure that the NCH Software folks will get to the bottom of it in a future update and correct some incompatibility between GR and Vista. Having been one of the first users of Vista, I have encountered such odd behavior before from a variety of software applications and usually the problem lies with a Vista incompatibility which is subsequently corrected.

 

I hope the problem is soon resolved because it is annoying, though thankfully, not catastrophic. Have a great day.

 

Regards,

-Phil

Thanks, Phil, for the input. I also run Vista. Did your GR ever record like it is supposed to? Mine did for about 10 consecutive cassettes when I first bought it. Then it started this problem. Hopefully NCH will get this figured out.

Carl

I recently purchased the Golden Records program. It was working fine for several days but now it's closing itself during a recording. It flashes a message before it closes but it's only on the screen for a fraction of a second so I can't read it. Any ideas? The opening screen shows that I'm using a registered version.

I, too have that problem. But it stays on long enough to tell me that the program had encountered a problem and had to shut down. I can restart it and it will convert and normalize the last song. But it screws up the number order and does not allow me to record but two or three songs at a time.