I thought the previous 3.2 versions were buggy, but 3.2.5 has taken it to a whole new level. It crashes on me many times a day the last few days. Seems like it usually causes my OS (Kubuntu 22.10) to cycle through displays of all possible sound output options while Audacity freezes and I have to terminate it. It’s a new PC, but no other applications have experienced any similar problems.
Edit for update: since posting this, the same flashing of different sound outputs thing has happened twice but WITHOUT freezing these two times somehow. It seems to be triggered by me applying effects (not actually playing audio). And since I now see it can happen without a freeze, it seems more likely that it’s the sometimes-cause of freezes rather than an effect. Second update: and it happened again but with an actual freeze this time, so alas there’s no chance of it transitioning to non-freezing events. This time it generated an ubuntu crash report that mentions /usr/bin/pipewire as the executable path crashing, even though audacity is the apparent crash, whatever that may mean. And this time I think all I’d done was select something to copy, wasn’t even doing an effect.
Before I installed pulseaudio (which is the selected playback device) it was behaving even worse.
I’m using the appimage of 3.2.5 that I installed a few days ago… I tried the 3.2.0 version from the kubuntu repositories first but had all sorts of problems with that and uninstalled it thinking the appimage might work better (but alas it’s been worse so far).
I don’t think this could have anything to do with system resources, because this PC has twice as much RAM and a much faster SSD drive compared to my old one on which Audacity 3.2.x didn’t freeze this much.
Also if anyone knows a way to get Audacity 2.4.2 to install on Kubuntu 22.10, that would be great (although not fully sufficient since I have no way to convert .aup3 to .aup, exporting importing and relabeling every track as a wav would take forever). Unfortunately it’s not in the repos, it’s no longer in the non-standard repo I found that was supposed to have it, and the .deb file I found has tons of unresolved dependencies.
For once, this time it generated an actual Audacity internal error message as well. I submitted the report but here’s a copy, not that there’s really much new in it:
There’s only one host option (alsa), playback is on pulse because everything else worked not at all or worse, and I’m not sure how to change the project sample rate.
The appimage finally packed it in completely and I can’t get it to start at all anymore. Desperately trying to get the older system version to run instead, but that’s packed it in too:
I uninstalled the apt version and installed the snap version – the third different version this week. The snap version is 3.1.3, and it tells me I should run
sudo snap connect audacity:alsa
which I did… but it promptly refuses to play any audio, giving “error opening sound device” on every available sound device option after I’ve done that. So all 3 versions of audacity won’t do anything at all now, in varied ways, and my project is dead in the water.
Edit: I’ve managed to achieve another bizarre form of failure where audacity thinks it’s playing but the rest of the system doesn’t think any audio is playing. Maybe I shouldn’t have run that connect command it told me to. But it said I could reverse it by removing /home/[user]/snap/audacity/common/Always use PulseAudio but I can’t do so because no such file exists!
Edit 2: I completely uininstalled and deleted the config of the snap audacity, reinstalled snap audacity, and this time ignored the prompt to run sudo snap connect audacity:alsa. That’s got it temporarily running and playing audio, whew.
So far so good. Will report back if all the other problems come back, but so far the 3.1.3 snap seems to be the one and only version that works – as long as I ignore the connect advice. Update a day later, it’s still running well – which is amazing, the other versions would’ve crashed many times in a day.
Okay, 3.1.3 is still freezing and crashing. And now that I think about it it froze a couple times yesterday too, but that was just so much less than I was expecting. My expectations are so low at this point that I’m amazed when it can remain alive for more than 30 minutes, so I guess I’ll be happy with that until such time as this version may also die.