When saving our most recent podcast episode, I got the spinning wheel of doom, then this happened:
Any thoughts on if it’s salvageable? It seems like it cut out a tiny bit of the actual audio but then also input blank space on either side of the pieces it cut out.
macOS Mojave 10.14.6
Audacity 2.3.0
The Beach Ball of Death is never a good sign. That’s The System signaling that something is taking way more time than allotted.
Can you Edit > UNDO and get pieces of it back? If it does come back, File > Export: WAV (MIcrosoft) 16-bit and make perfect quality backups. As quickly as possible. If UNDO fails, then there is probably a very serious machine problem.
My first guess is the show is toast. We should find out what’s wrong so you don’t cook another one.
Start doing system-y things. Are you running out of drive space? Are you using many different apps and instead of actually closing them, you put them to sleep? That’s a favorite. Macs like to keep pieces of running apps alive in case you want them again.The apps don’t have to go through the whole launch routine. The down side is each one takes up room in live memory.
Does the doc in your machine have little lights or ticks under the apps that are running? Are there a lot of lights?
Do you use iCloud? As part of production? That may not be the best idea. Audacity doesn’t do network management particularly well. I know it looks like a disk drive to you, but to apps, it looks like a network connection.
Koz
Hey Koz,
Thanks! I do have little black dots underneath running programs, and I make sure to close them all except for Chrome. I have a few tabs open during the podcast for references, names, etc. First time this has happened in 80+ episodes, but I guess from now on I’m launching fresh and making sure nothing else is open. We can use our ChromeBook if we need to be on the internet too.
Don’t use iCloud. 16GB of RAM. Memory is starting to get a little low but there’s still plenty left for the short-term.
Thanks again,
Bill
Memory is starting to get a little low
How low?
The video people run into this. “Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the show failed or the System goes nuts after many successful shows.” Video, meet Lord SMAF.
Entertainment production takes up a lot more room than you think. How long is the show? Every time you do a serious effect or edit, Audacity saves the whole show in super high quality format as UNDO. When you Edit > UNDO, it’s not taking the last effect out of the show, it’s opening the show just before this one. That uses up memory (drive space) in a hurry.
Then, when you’re done editing and ready to save the Project, Audacity has to try and jam it into what little drivespace you have left.
Absent any other problems, that would be my first guess. You hit a common signature failure.
Koz