Audacity crashes when aligning Label tracks Align End to End

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
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1

Description:
App Name & Version: Audacity

App Source: MS Store

App Architecture: X64

App Version : 3.7.1

Pre-condition

1.App should be installed and launched successfully.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Launch Audacity
  2. Open audio file
  3. Add Label Track
  4. Go to Track → New → Label Track
  5. Select label track
  6. Align tracks → Align End to End

Actual Results:

Audacity application is crashing with Exceptional code 0xc0000005.

Expected Results:

Application should not crash.

Reproducibility Rate: 5/5

Is Audacity team aware about his issue? If yes, is there a plan to be fixed this issue on any upcoming releases?

2

I suspect the the Track align commands were never designed to work with Label tracks.

For example if you have a couple of audio tracks and a label track, select all and then use Align End to End - then only the audio tracks get moved the label track is left alone unmoved.

I also tried:
Audio Track1
Label Track-1
Audio Track2
Label Track-2
(to simulate a pair of Sync-locked track groups) - and selecting all of that and using Align End to End also aligned just the audio tracks and left the label tracks alone.

@Vishnu what precisely is your use case fir having the two label tracks, just the two label tracks?

Having said that Audacity should never crash so I will log an issue on Muse’s Github bug-tracker using your STRs (Steps To Reproduce) - but I will wait until I hear back from you about your use case.

Peter

3

There is an easier way to reproduce the crash (tested on Linux):

  1. Launch Audacity
  2. “Tracks menu > Add New > Label Track”
  3. “Tracks menu > Align Tracks > Align End to End”
4

As far as I remember, aligning label tracks has never been implemented. The Align commands should work with Audio tracks and Note tracks.

I do see some possible (but rare) use cases for aligning label tracks, but also practical implementation problems. In my opinion, Label tracks (and Time tracks) should be ignored by the Align commands, and the documentation should explicitly state that the Align commands operate (only) on Audio track and Note tracks.

5

Hi @waxcylinder,

Thanks for your response. We’ve noticed that when we select both Audio and Label tracks and use the “Align Track End to End” feature, everything works fine. However, if we select only Label tracks and use the same feature, the application crashes instead of showing a pop-up message instructing us to select one or more audio tracks, similar to how the Time Track feature works.

We are reporting this as a stability issue to prevent data loss due to crashes. While we understand that data can be recovered upon relaunching the application, it would be beneficial to fix this crash issue and provide an appropriate pop-up message to guide users in selecting the correct track combinations.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

6

Indeed - Audacity should not crash - so thanks for the bug report (and further feedback).

Good catch @Vishnu :slight_smile:

And yes I did do some furter testing yesterday (after @steve 's comments in this thread) and observed, as you say, that the Time Track behaves much better in this regard.

I will log this on Muse’s Github later today.

UPDATE
Further testing shows that this is a regression on Audacity 2.3.0, introduced in 2.3.1 which was released on 18Nov22 - so we have had this bug for over two years now.

Peter

1 Like
7

@Vishnu @steve

Logged as:

And thanks Steve for the simpler STRs :slightly_smiling_face:

Peter