How to stop Audacity crashing frequently and losing my whole project?

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
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Every few hours of recording, my Audacity runs a debug report out of nowhere and crashes. The Automatic Crash Recovery pops up when I re-open. I see nearly my whole project behind the window. I select the project it says it can recover and I select Recover Selected. Sometimes, it works. Other times, it saves only the last bit I recorded, and makes the rest of the project silent. I search in the Session Data and Autosave files and nothing.

How do I prevent this crashing? When it does crash, what is the best way to save the majority of the project? I save my files literally every 2 minutes of recording.

I have Audacity 2.4.1.

My Mac iOS is Ventura 13.2.1. I can’t update to the latest iOS because I use Source Connect 3.9 which is only compatible up to iOS 15.2.

Should I update Audacity? Is there a way I can update my iOS to 15.2 specifically?

Are there other things I can do on my MacBook Air to prevent frequent crashing? When running Audacity, I need to have a few Chrome tabs open, Adobe Acrobat, and iTunes at most.

PLEASE HELP! I’m a voice actor and I record many different kinds of projects every day including long audiobooks so is VERY frustrating.

I want to eventually learn something more robust like ProTools but I’m so used to Audacity so it would be great to continue using it without it crashing every few hours and sometimes, losing all my hard work.

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I’m a Windows guy, and luckily I’ve never had an Audacity crash, but…

If you’re using a USB audio device, maybe you have a flakey USB connection/cable. Or some other hardware problem.

Or… are you using any 3rd-party plug-in effects? Very few 3rd-party plug-ins officially support Audacity, although sometimes they work anyway. A lot of people have trouble with the OpenVINO plug-ins too.

That shouldn’t cause a crash but even without running multiple applications, your operating system is always multitasking and interrupting and you sometimes get dropouts and glitches.

I want to eventually learn something more robust like ProTools

Maybe try GarageBand? Or Oceanaudio is also free. Or, DAWs.

1 Like
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You might want to upgrade to Audacity 2.4.2 from here. It is the last (and best) of the 2.x versions.

You could try saving your work and quitting Audacity every half hour or so. This will clean up the Undo buffer.

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I remember having used Audacity 2.something earlier, but I am now at version 3.6.4. But I never had any crashes related to Audacity with any macOS.

I doubt any Mac computer can use any version of iOS. iOS is the operating system for iPhones. The operating system for Mac computers is macOS.

Besides this:

  • It may be that macOS 13 (Ventura) and the version of Audacity you use do not play well together; I cannot judge this since i do not have a computer running Ventura.
  • What is your MacBook’s configuration? How much memory does it have? Is there enough free space on the internal drive / SSD?

Keep in mind that Audacity projects can grow biiiiiig, since Audacity saves every action / mouseclick to enable undoing.

@DVDdoug recommended to try out Garageband - I never got along with that piece of software; maybe I am too much used to Audacity?

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If your needs are fairly simple, I would suggest giving Ocenaudio a go. It’s stable, fast and free. I use that and Audacity according to the task in hand. Ocenaudio has never crashed for me. There is a series of YouTube tutorials here: Ocenaudio tutorials.