Since 11am this morning (GMT+1) Audacity on my Mcbook has been taking very long to accept any editing I do to my audio.
It was fine this morning and is now giving me the spiraling wheel of “please wait” when I ask it to do simple things like delete a breath.
I have now asked it to do a simple noise reduction and it cannot save updates, with the message “automatic database backup failed”.
I have checked the storage space on my mac and it’s still got 300GB of space and all my other apps and programs are running fine.
Thank you for your help with this. I’m 48 hours from finishing editing a book ;(
SBBOD? Spinning Beach Ball of Death (as the video people put it).
Your instinct is correct. Audacity tries to save a copy of your whole show when you do an edit. If for any reason it can’t do that, it will choke.
Do you use external drives, home network drives, or internet-connected services? They may all cause problems. Did you use other applications between the time it worked and the time it didn’t?
Can you File > Save Project > Backup Project… under a different name? If it lets you do that, I would, and restart the machine and see if that helps. If it won’t let you do that, your show may be in jeopardy.
Koz
Hello and thank you for your time,
I do not use external drives, home network drives, or internet-connected services, I am new and save everything to my documents and then backup onto a hard drive using time machine.
I have tried File > Save Project > Backup Project… with not issues and also File > Save Project > Save project as… and File > Save Project …
So saving the whole file is not the issue, it’s more that it will not do editing as fast as it did this morning and that it can no longer do edits such as “Noise reduction”.
So the question is: after turning everything off and on again multiple times, do I simply delete and reinstall the program, ie: audacity?
Thanks,
Emma
So you are using a Mac. Would be a good idea to mention some details when asking questions, for example:
- your operating system and version
- version of Audacity used
- amount of free disk space
- amount of RAM in your machine
(and no, although TimeMachine is useful - it is not a real backup…)
If the problem is with your settings (which I do not believe - but could be), just deleting and re-installing Audacity would not change anything. Your settings are saved in your user library:
~/Library/Application Support/audacity
So you should maybe move the whole folder “audacity” to the trash can (or to another place, if you think you would like to use it later again).
Are you in 3.7.1? Do you still have the installer for the last version that worked right?
I’m not a fan of doing an update (not necessarily an upgrade) while you’re in the middle of a production.
And yes, take the Application Support/audacity to the trash in addition to trashing the program is the only way to make Audacity “forget” about the past.
Whereas I do have two different methods of saving machine work, what is it about Time Machine you don’t like? I will shortly bring a shiny new Mac on-line and plan on carefully/manually transferring older work over, I believe I’m not supposed to need to, right? It says here…
Koz
If we lost you there. It’s “Go” from the top of the desktop > Go To folder. That’s mine with the name deleted.
audacity
is one of the folders in there. That’s where Audacity keeps all its settings, notes, and adjustments so you don’t have to make them all up again when you update.
The problem is what happens when that folder becomes damaged.
Koz
My mac is Mojave 10.14.6 (18G9323)
MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015)
Processor 1,6 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
StartUp disk OWC Aura Pro X2
I have checked the storage space on my mac and it’s still got 500GB of space and all my other apps and programs are running fine.
I was using Audacity 3.7.1.
I have done this and found the 3.7.0 in my downloads and installed it, but it still will not do any large jobs, such as noise reduction on a 3 minute recording.
Do you think it possible / a solution / a good idea if I could tell the program (also how) to save to my external drive instead of my documents folder?
So still stuck but thank you very much for your help so far and any other ideas you may have.
This is the error message that comes up when I try to get audacity to do an “Edit > Noise reduction”
Automatic Database backup failed.
Problem details:
{
“timestamp”: 1736278637,
“event_id”: “9e10c52291e04bc4bfccd287d7f40c86”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.7.0”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Macintosh”,
“version”: “10.14.6”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “Warning”,
“value”: “Automatic database backup failed.”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false,
“data”: {
“sqlite3.rc”: “1”,
“sqlite3.col”: “doc”,
“sqlite3.context”: “ProjectGileIO::WriteDoc::writeBlobStream”
}
}
}
]
}
}
“name”: “Macintosh”,
“version”: “10.14.6”
I bet I know one problem that’s going to come up immediately. You have an old, Intel-based Mac. Mine is very slightly older than that and I had trouble recently when the system refuse to show me my on-line gas bill.
I’m getting a new one.
Mac, not gas bill. Intel Macs are no longer updated.
Koz
Maybe try running a program to repair the SQLlite database files on the computer.
HOORAY!!! I’ve worked it out!
I’ve got a corrupt recording that will not let me edit it at all.
We tried that recording on another computer and had the same issues, even after having saved it to an external hard drive.
I have no idea how that has happened or what I clicked, (as I said I’m a newbie) but all my previous recordings and raw files are fine to edit in the audacity program.
I have therefore made a copy of the raw file to begin editing it from scratch (sigh but it’s all learning). I shall now save each edited 10 minutes of audio from now on.
Thank you all for your suggestions! I really do appreciate a good forum.
Off for an all night editing session 
Thanks again,
Emma
Not the whole truth… I have the last Intel-based MacBook Air (from 2020), and it still gets updates of macOS for Sequoia.
I bet you could bring your “old” Mac to a newer system using OCLP (a hack, I know - and you’ll have to do this whenever you want to install an update to your OS).
But we’re moving now to an off-topic discussion.
There was enough change behind the sofa to get a 13" M3 MBA.
Koz
