Desired Result:
A sound file that repeats the clip twice, silences the third repetition, then joins these three and repeats the entire thing multiple times.
Actual Results:
Sometimes it works correctly
Sometimes it produces multiple repetitions of silence, each 3x the length of the original clip
Sometimes it gives up at the “Silence” step, telling me that “Silence” requires one or more clips to be selected.
These all happen with clips from the same original project, in the same session (each copied-and-pasted into a new file). Removing the initial “SelectTracks” doesn’t seem to change behaviour, nor does adding it later before Silence.
I have seen no differentiating features between clips that work and ones that don’t. In fact, I have occasionally seen clips that worked in a previous session fail in the next.
Does anyone have any idea why this macro doesn’t produce the same results every time? Thanks for your time!
That’s where I was going to go with that, but I changed my mind, such as it is.
I think you designed a computer health checker. I think if you changed machines the problem would vanish.
The bell rang when you said sometimes it would misbehave with the exact same sound file.
When was the last time you restarted your Mac? Or better, Shutdown > Wait > Start. Don’t let anything else start. Disconnect the network or WiFi, or both.
Still do it? Pay attention to changes in the problem, not just solved-it-or-not.
Does the problem still happen if you use audio from somewhere else (such as from a “known to be good” WAV file)?
I’m not sure what you mean. I’ve tried multiple MP3 files, all of which work and play just fine.
I think you designed a computer health checker. I think if you changed machines the problem would vanish.
…
When was the last time you restarted your Mac? Or better, Shutdown > Wait > Start. Don’t let anything else start. Disconnect the network or WiFi, or both.
It’s been a bit since I restarted my Mac, but I’m not sure how that relates to a macro-runner, especially given the presumably simple steps in the one above? Everything else is running & playing fine on it.
Disconnect the network or WiFi, or both.
That’s important. Audacity doesn’t much like dealing with external drives, network drives, or cloud drives.
Internal drive only.
No changes when disconnecting the WiFi, and the audio is saved on the internal drive, then copied and pasted into a new file which should be in memory anyhow.
(Not to mention, if disconnecting WiFi changes the behaviour of a macro that has absolutely nothing to do with WiFi, or restarting a computer is necessary to run a macro that shouldn’t be doing anything more than repeating and selecting clips, the system is far too broken to be useful.)
I’m not sure what you mean. I’ve tried multiple MP3 files, all of which work and play just fine.
I don’t know if it’s relevant but there are LOTs of “imperfect” MP3s floating-around that play OK with various media players but fail when trying to open in Audacity.
I don’t know if it’s relevant but there are LOTs of “imperfect” MP3s floating-around that play OK with various media players but fail when trying to open in Audacity.
The MP3s play fine in Audacity, it’s only after copying a clip from them, pasting it into a new file, and running the macro that issues happen.
The problem also happens when recording directly from a microphone and using that audio as a basis.
For anyone coming back to this post in the future, the workaround was to apply keystrokes to the desired actions instead, so that I could get work done in a reasonable time and flow.
Disappointed that the app seems so buggy, and that troubleshooting steps involved immediately blaming my computer or files without any explanation of why something like WiFi would be relevant to the specific task at hand (which seems to ultimately be a bug in selection logic at some level), or why bad original sound files would have affected clips pasted into a new project (at which point the audio had been imported, played, clipped, selected, copied, and pasted into an entirely new file in memory, so should itself be clean unless something unholy is going on under the hood, especially since manual steps work fine). I would have been happy to provide data for a proper bug report if someone could have said what might have been useful.
but strange how this problem is not repeatable for anyone else.
Deduction: you are doing something different from what we are doing - which is tricky because we are doing what you said you were doing.