I was running Audacity from Debian Wheezy’s package manager and was getting constant crashes so like I normally do, I decided to compile from source. I’m still getting the crash and here is the output:
It happens frequently enough to make Audacity un-usable. I am recording voice-overs, so I will have a project open and record, stop, record, stop, etc, each time adding a new track to the project at the end of the previous track. I then do a bit of processing on the whole file, then export selections into oggs for import into video. It will usually crash by the third or fourth track i attempt to record. Even after I recover, if I have 5-6 tracks in the project, i can still manage to record 2-3 maybe 4 before it crashes, so it does not seem related to the number of tracks I have loaded.
Do you have a way to do a multiple-pass memory test and/or do you have enough memory to do audio production? Audacity makes very good use of high memory and it is sometimes your first indication that you have a failed strip.
“How come every time my show gets to a certain size, it crashes?”
…because at that size, it needs to step on memory strip four, element three which isn’t there any more?
If you do a mem check, make sure to run it multiple times.
"Block 3 failed ‘Chasing The Chickens’ test on pass 12, 02:45 "
I will do a memory check, but we’re only talking about a minute or two of mono audio. It doesn’t seem to be related to memory, I have 8 gb and only about 1 gb in use at any one time.
There is a known problem between PortAudio and PulseAudio when rapidly stopping and starting the audio stream, though this usually causes Audacity to freeze, not “crash”.
If the problem is “freezing” not “crashing”, then there are a couple of ways to work around the problem.
In the Device Toolbar, select the appropriate “hw” option rather than “Pulse” or “Default”. The “hw” option accesses the audio device directly through ALSA, bypassing PulseAudio. Note that this will usually only work if Audacity is the only application accessing the sound card.
Launch Audacity with the command:
env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 audacity
This allows PulseAudio and PortAudio to play together more nicely. If you have a lot of tracks, you may need to increase the value to greater than 30.
I’m not sure what the Gdk error is and I’m not on my Linux machine at the moment. Where/when are you getting that error? Did you get that error with the repository build of Audacity?