Audacity is open already and won't open [SOLVED]

Audacity 2.1.3.0 for Mac, OS X 10.4 or later

I was doing a “normalize” on a recently digitized LP album. The rotating beachball appeared and stayed for at least 20 minutes. The ESC button didn’t work so I re-started. When I attempted to start Audacity I got a message stating :

“Audacity is already running.
The system has detected that another copy of Audacity is running.
Running two copies of Audacity simultaneously may cause data loss or cause your system to crash.
Use the New or Open commands in the currently running Audacity process toped multiple projects simultaneously.”

However, Mac tells me Audacity is NOT running. (No dot beneath the icon in the bottom menu bar).
I even tried opening the older version of Audacity, with the same result.
I restarted Mac, that didn’t help.
When I click-to-open Audacity I get the message, above, but no way in the menu to close or open a new file. All I get in the upper/LH menu is the Apple logo and “Audacity”. Clicking on Audacity does not reveal any other words/options.

Please Help ! / David Watkins

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/audacity-is-already-running-error-solved/40481/2

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/audacity-is-already-running-error-and-no-lock/43162/3


Koz

Thanks for the two posts you sent yesterday. I’ve read thru them both and cannot quite understand.

#1 “Audacity is already running error”

“lock file” ?
In Finder, Go > Go to Folder – do not understand (I’ve used Macs for about 28 years)


#2 “Audacity is already running error and no lock”

There IS a /MacHD/users/davidwatkins/ directory but NO “Library”.
There IS a /MacHD/Library/Application Support/ directory, but NO “audacity”.

I’m stumped right now. / David Watkins

Task Switch to Finder. Take your mouse and click on the Go menu in the Finder menu bar. This causes the Go menu to expand downwards. Now click on “Go to Folder”.

The user’s Library folder ~/Library/ has been hidden since Lion. Go > Go to Folder lets you navigate to it even though it is hidden.


Gale

Thank you so much for your prompt reply. I checked out what you said about “Go”, etc. However…

I turned the Mac completely off overnite, re-started late morning and checked emails. After lunch I went back to try and fix Audacity. Thought I’d try one more time to start it up. It worked ! - It wanted me to do something with the file it died with. Since I had just saved before attempting “Normalize” I said kill it. Finished processing the original file and everything appeared to work fine. Again, thank you so much / David Watkins

You can read about that here: Automatic Crash Recovery.

Good. I will mark this as solved and lock the topic.

Gale