In Audacity 3.2.4 on Debian 12.
This happens every time a user attempts to use a “Change Speed” effect on any waveform, although it also appears on occasion when using any other given built-in effect. After attempting to use one of these effects, Audacity is still responsive to user input, but if the user attempts to use any of the Effects, they simply do not open their respective dialog windows. In addition, any other utility in Audacity that requires opening its own secondary dialog window is also unfunctional. I.e, any Effects, any importing and/or exporting of files, Preferences, About, and much else. On rare occasion, when using an effect on a waveform — after it breaks in the manner described above — one can wait for a substantial length of time (upwards of 45 minutes!) and only then will any sort of Debug report dialog box display. But this doesn’t always show.
The only remedy I have been able to come up with so far on my machine is to issue commands like “pkill audacity” or “xkill” in another terminal to force Audacity to crash, and then to restart it. Either that, or like in the last mention above, once the Debug report appears (finally), the user can close it and the application can be restarted. But this latter option is uncommon to say the least, as most times it just simply doesn’t appear.
Despite my machine being of relatively lower-end hardware, Audacity is not being bottlenecked by CPU or RAM. This issue has presented itself to me in newer versions of Audacity, although I’m not sure of what version it first reared its ugly head. From a technical standpoint, it is bizarre. I’ve no idea of the coding conflicts that might cause this. Perhaps something with QT and/or GTK? I don’t use Windows and have no idea if it appears in those versions. Windows users, share your experiences. I am assuming Windows versions of Audacity use native Windows libraries for graphics and not QT/GTK but I’m probably wrong.
Regardless, what I can tell you is that from a user standpoint, this bug is infuriating. It is impossible to finish my work because of this. I use Audacity around 4-5 days a week at my home, and on average in sessions up to 5 hours in length. I have been using Audacity in this way since 2013, so I guess I could say I am pretty familiar with the application. Despite this, the version I am using on this machine has no added effects — so I can’t imagine that it is something else conflicting. And yes, I have turned it on and off again.
Although this post is long, I hope it’s been thorough enough. Looking for similar posts on this forum before, either the other posts’ authors aren’t providing enough information for it to be solvable, or the solutions that are offered don’t help enough to solve it. Here is a link to a tar.bz2 of the debug report, if the link goes bad sometime later let me know and I’ll find a better way to share it.
[Edit: fixed some minor typos.]