Mac OS 13.6: Help!
Upon launching, get a dialogue box: “Audacity is already running. The system has detected another copy of Audacity is running. …2 copies running simultaneously may cause data loss or system to crash. Use New or Open commands in currently Audacity…”
Problem is I cannot get beyond the dialogue box to open Audacity. I’ve checked Activity Monitor, and there is no indication of Audacity running. Tried deleting Audacity and re-installing to no effect.
Basically stuck.
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks
There’s probably a “lock file” left over from a previous session.
See this post for how to delete it: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/cannot-get-audacity-program-to-shut-down/47939/5
There’s probably a “lock file” left over from a previous session.
And that can happen if you had Audacity or the computer “exit in an uncontrolled manner” (crash). Did you? Does this happen often? If you have frequent crashes, then it’s a terrific idea to solve that before you keep going with Audacity sound production. There’s nothing like having your carefully constructed show go into the mud just before you save it.
Koz
Big Thanks Steve & Koz.
Back running. (And Audacity has crashed more than I’m comfortable with. In pattern recognition mode to try to zero in on the cause.)
Does your machine connect to “network services?” Read that in the widest possible sense. Network Connected Drives? iCloud? Neighbor’s 3TB drive on Ethernet across the yard and over the fence?
Makers love to let you think that Cloud Stuff is just the same as locally connected drives, but Audacity knows it’s not. Best part is the connection is erratic. Developers have a phrase “Moon Phase Errors.”
Sometimes you can force it to fail. Make a stupid-long show and then apply complex effects to it. Did Audacity fall over? How full are your drives? If it’s a laptop, run on batteries. If it’s on batteries, run on shore power.
Do Something to it to force it off top-dead-center.
There was someone in our office who had an unstable laptop and it turned out they couldn’t run on batteries. The batteries were fried.
Anything like that.
When was the last time you brought your machine down to complete power off and pulled the power cord? Pay attention to the little spinning daisy as it goes down. That’s the Mac cleaning up. Don’t pull the plug before it gets done.
Desktop > Go > Utilities > Activity Monitor. That will let you see who’s gobbling up all the resources and time. I have an app that occasionally runs a licensing verification module (I’m correctly licensed) and it would slowly take over the machine.
I used to regularly get one of the division managers out of trouble by closing about fifty things he had running in the background and forgot about. Audacity needs all the hot, running, clean memory it can get.
Koz