Audacity stopped working

This is weird.

I have been using Audacity for about four months no problem. All of a sudden, when I tried to open it, the following things happen:

  • I get a pop up message “An instance of Audacity is already running”
  • The colour wheel appears and the program seems frozen trying to load
  • Activity Monitor lists Audacity as “Not Responding”
  • If I move Audacity to the trash, I can’t empty the trash because “Audacity is still in use”
  • When I shut down and reboot the system, I can empty the trash, but when I reinstall the program and try to start it, all the same things happen.

2012 Macbook Pro
4GB Ram
Audacity 2.0.5

I’m trying to remember how to cure this. When the desktop is open > Apple (upper left) > Force Quit. Is Audacity listed there? Kill it.

Then restart the Mac.

I think there’s a way to do it through Utilities > Terminal and the “top” command. I don’t remember how to stop a process. “Halt?”

Anyway, see if Force Quit works.

Koz

When you restart, uncheck the option to “re-open windows when logging back in”.
– Bill

Sorry. You are misunderstanding my problem.

The program is not running, not available to force quit. Then I click once on the icon, and it says it is already running. See screen shots.
Audacity_NOT_running.jpg
Clicking once on Audacity icon.jpg
Error.png

Please note, Audacity 2.0.5 and 2.0.6 do not officially support Yosemite.

Make sure in Force Quit that Audacity isn’t running.

Open Finder, Go > Go to Folder and type:

~/Library/Application Support/audacity/

Open audacity.cfg in TextEdit. Select all the text and delete it. Then type the following at the top of the file:

NewPrefsInitialized=1

Save audacity.cfg and restart Audacity.

If that does not work then perhaps some plugin you added is causing a problem. If so, make sure Audacity isn’t running, then edit audacity.cfg so it shows this:

NewPrefsInitialized=1
[AudioUnits]
Enable=0
GUI=0
[VST]
Enable=0
GUI=0
Rescan=0

Gale