this nyquist plug-in ALWAYS causes Audacity to freeze then crash http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyquist_Effect_Plug-ins#Panning_.28random.29
please remove this plug-in from the archive, it DOES NOT work!!
Thanks for the feedback (but please don’t shout) 
I’ll take a look at it and see if it can be fixed.
All of the recent plug-ins that have been added to the wiki have been fairly rigorously tested but we don’t have the manpower to retrospectively test all of the old plug-ins, thus we rely on user feedback from people such as yourself.
Please feel free to report problems that you might find with any of the other plug-ins on the wiki and I’ll be happy to check them out and either fix or remove them.
The problem seems to be because the effect is calculated in RAM. If the selection is too long, then the available RAM (which needs to be real RAM, not virtual RAM) will be exhausted and cause the crash. Rather than removing the plug-in altogether I have limited it internally to a maximum of 1 million samples which should be safe on most machines.
Please try this version and let me know if you still have problems with it,
panrand.ny (1.4 KB)
Justin,
Thanks for reporting the crash.
I would again (also) ask you not to shout (or emphasize).
Audacity Team takes quality very seriously. Please look at Steve’s response as evidence of that. We don’t need to be instructed in capital letters to “fix things immediately” or “remove this feature”.
As a couple of users have pointed out to me in PM’s, any newcomer to the Forum reading your posts would think Audacity is buggy junk and we don’t care. That’s why we want you to stop shouting and emphasizing.
And if you can give us more details here:
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/mp3s-created-in-audacity-create-error-message-when-wmp-sy/27465/1
then we can consider if there is some Audacity problem or not.
Thanks for using Audacity.
Gale
I think that there’s also a bug in the last 3 lines.
The sound is made mono, but there is no “mult 0.5” before the sum of the two channels, thus one channel can be up to 6 dB too high, if “where” is full to one direction.
I’ll take a look, what can be done to increase the sound length to a tolerable amount.
For the peak function, 1 milion samples seem to be enough to proceed, but the passed sounds should surely be longer.
Thanks Robert.
If you have time perhaps you could also take a look at the other “pan” plug-ins by David R Sky. Could they perhaps be combined into one plug-in rather than three separate ones without making the interface too complicated? Perhaps using a multi-choice widget to select the mode of operation?
Sure, this can be done. There are a lot of stereo/panning effects kicking about that could be replaced by a single one.
The only thing that prevented me up till now were the qualms to fiddle with David’s legacy code. Since my programming style is fairly different, I can’t tell how much there will remain from the original code.
If I’m bug fixing a plug-in I like to try and keep the code as close to the original as possible, though I may add indentation to improve readability and remove excess white space (David was blind, so he rarely used code indentation).
If the bug fixing requires substantial changes, or if there are substantial functional changes (such as combining multiple effects into one, then it essentially becomes a new plug-in, in which case I would tend to approach it from scratch without references to the original code.
Where an idea or code are derived from another persons work then I think that credit/acknowledgement is appropriate, either as a code comment or in the ;info text depending on the extent of that contribution to the new effect.
If you write a panning effect that combines the functionality of the current plug-ins (and perhaps adds new features) then I’d suggest that you write it from scratch as a new effect. If adequately replaced, the old effects can be moved to the “legacy plug-in” page (currently a “Work in Progress” until there is a bit more content for the page).
If you want to make a new panning plug-in, I’d suggest that you try to keep the interface as simple as possible as the plug-ins that it will hopefully replace are all fairly simple. Also it would probably be best to split to a new topic on the New Plug-Ins board.
I think that I’ll pursuit both options, firstly I’ll attempt to make the current plug-in the most stable withoutt modifying too much.
Just to prevent the plug-in from crashing Audacity if the user wants to try out this legacy plug-in.
The new, bundled plug-in will only have a dedication to David (since I am walking somehow in his foot steps).
The idea as such, namely to play with the pan knob is presumably not so worth be regarded as “protected” as other ideas of David are.
I mean, it is the most logical way to use noise to control the position of the sound in the stereo field. It is possible that I’ll use a different method to filter the noise. (the first method I’ve tried presently has crashed Audacity, that’s why I have the time to write this post…
).
The plug-in is back on the wiki without the artificial limit to the maximum duration as Robert has identified the cause of the excessive RAM usage.
Thanks Robert, your fix works.
Some care still needs to be used with this plug-in as it does not check for user errors, but I anticipate that this plug-in will superseded in the near future.
There is still an issue that Audacity may freeze or crash with excessively long audio selections (hours), but it should now be safe for normal use.