I ran a self-created macro against a collection of audio files (3,637 files), every time it locks the system up (Mac 10.13.6, Audacity 2.3.2). It’s not always on the same file, the latest run stopped on file #98, so it’s not making it in very far. I have a screenshot (taken with my phone) at the time of the latest lock, tried to attach but the forum says it’s too large.
Here are the steps in my macro:
01 Normalize
02 Export as FLAC
03 END
To recreate:
Tools > Macros…
Select the macro (I named it Normalize to FLAC)
Click on Apply Macro to Files
Selected the audio files which are in a folder by clicking on the first file then scrolling down to the last file and Shift-Click on it
Click on Open
It starts running, but somewhere after about 90 files it locks the entire system.
Right now I am run-in them thru the old version (2.0.3) and it is well beyond where 2.3.3 locked up (340 files an counting). This will take ~15 hrs to complete, after that I will try 500.
Only it doesn’t normalize the audio, which is what I’m trying to do.
Audacity 2.0.3 made it through all but ~600 songs when it tossed an error writing to the .tmp file for several songs. Not sure just what it is trying to do, but it looked like it added extra characters to the end of the file name and reached the character limit. I can’t go any further, tried just doing those last few files, but it stopped at the same point each time.
Looking at the error message I posted the original file name is:
The Carpenters_ The Essential Collection (1965-1997) [Box Set]-05-Karen_Ella Medley (This Masquerade_My Funny Valentine_I’ll Be Seeing You_Someone to Watch Over Me_As Time Goes By_Don’t Get Around Much Anymore_I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart).ma4
Audacity was adding:
" - 2019-09-26 14-24-27 N-7.tmp"
That’s a lot of characters to add when the file is being moved to a temporary folder anyway.
26 additional characters (“.mp4” has been replaced by “.tmp”). That still allows you up to 229 characters for the file name.
The thing that concerns me most is that you say it causes Audacity to lock up. What happens if you click the “OK” button on the error screen?
No, two different errors. This one just throws a message that I can cancel out of, but I can’t normalize the songs (and there seem to be a lot of them).
The problem here is that I have to make the song names unique so that Audacity will see them. Audacity won’t dive through folders, everything has to be at the top level. Because of that I have to use a program to rename the files so that all of the names are unique, that leads to long file names. Yeah, 229 is a lot, but not to make them unique. The app I use offers selections from the meta data to combine to make them unique. I had picked album title and song name. I’m going to have to see if I can use something else to make the names smaller. It took 18.4 hrs to get to this point.
The lockup didn’t happen with 2.0.3, just seems to happen with 2.3.3. When it locks up I can’t do anything short of powering down the computer, it locks solid. I can repeat it, if you tell me what information you need to debug the problem then I’ll copy it off to a file and attach it here.
Is it locking up on particular files? If so, are you able to process those files by “manually” applying the commands (rather than via a Macro), or does one of those commands still lock up?
I tried to test your theory by seeing if there is a particular song that it is locking on
First, there is not. I started Audacity starting further down the song list, selecting only 156 files, it still locked at 95 files (prior was 97). The file it locked on before was processed, but Audacity locked on a different file.
Second, I have a new problem. I had to force shutdown the Mac, now when I tried to run Audacity it thinks there is a copy still running. I have tried restarting the computer and shutting it down, neither resolved the problem. Image of the error message is attached.
Okay, I tried something different. I selected a completely different set of files and ran it through, still locked up at 97 files. Thus far it seems 95-97 files is the sweet (or sour) spot. Here is a screenshot of the macro I create.
Memory Leak? Every time Audacity loops through a file it leaves a tiny part of itself in memory.
Go > Utilities > Activity Monitor.
CPU, MEMORY and DISK are semi-real time displays and you can watch the progress of your jobs and how many resources are being used. It’s possible you’re going to find something slowly filling up or in some other way advancing over time, eventually failing.
So it previously locked on file 97, but this time it locked on file 95, but it processed file 97 on the way to 95 ? How can that be? Why / how did it reach file 97 before file 95?
Different runs with different files trying to see if it is a specific file causing the problem. First run locked on the 97th file, second run locked on the 95th file of its run.
