Hello,
We’re having some issues with Audacity in a school lab environment.
These are network accounts on El Capitan machines. Local accounts have no problems launching Audacity, but network accounts (which all the students are) receive a pop up saying that there was an error locking the temporary folder. No lock file is created in the temporary folder when this occurs, and the application quits when selecting “Yes” to launch the Audacity anyway.
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
P
We should wait for another elf, but I know Audacity doesn’t do well across a network. It doesn’t understand network management and delays.
Koz
Hehe, fair enough.
We currently have it running without issues on the same machines in Mavericks on those network accounts, but El Cap/Sierra is a no go so far. Hopefully one of those elfs will have a good suggestion or two 
Thanks for taking the time to reply,
P
I have posted this question to the developers mailing list but so far no concrete answers.
I’ll be away for a couple of days, so apologies for the delay in getting an answer for you.
– Bill
No worries. Much appreciated. Thanks Bill.
It appears no-one in our support or developer community has experience with Mac network accounts.
You say the Mavericks machines work but the El Cap and Sierra machines don’t. Is there any way to check where the lock file is, and then check the permissions of the folder(s) it resides in, then change the El Cap/Sierra permissions to match the Mavericks permissions?
With a local account, and using Audacity 2.1.3 (you are, aren’t you?) the lock file is in ~/Library/Application Support/Audacity/Session Data and is called “audacity-lock-”.
I don’t know where this would be with a network account.
This looks like a permissions issue (sorry if I’m stating the obvious), so examining the differences in permissions in the two cases may help solve the problem.
– Bill
What kind of server are the network accounts on? OSX with the server app? Linux? Windows?
Between Mavericks, El Capitan and Sierra, Apple depreciated SMB1 and AFS. Authentication is different too. You might need to look into that on the server side.
I’m sorry it’s not a real solution. I strictly avoid network storage when doing audio.
Thanks Bill, I’ll check permissions once again. During testing I did see the lock file being created in the appropriate directory.
Hi Cyrano, I think that you just may be onto something. I tested Audacity with a new 5.3.1 server and the network accounts had no issues. It seems to be related to our main server which is running an older version.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Planned obsolescence by Apple…
Well, sometimes it’s needed. Sometimes it’s wanted 
Ok. This issue does not occur on 5.3.1 server network accounts. This must be related to our older servers. We’re about to upgrade them so I won’t be troubleshooting the issue further however.
Thanks for the help.