Hello. I am using Audacity 2.0.5 (acquired from the Synaptic Package Manager) on Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon and am having issues with frequent crashing.
Audacity crashes maybe 30-50% of the time that I try to record something. It will crash either during the recording process, or (more frequently) when I press the “Stop” button.
My computer has 32 GB of RAM and an AMD Athlon II x4 640 Quad Core processor (3 GHz), so speed and RAM shouldn’t be an issue. I always run Audacity with no other programs open, yet it still crashes frequently – even after a fresh reboot.
I realize this problem is somewhat vague and isn’t really a “bug,” but I’d like to fix this problem, and I’m not really sure where to start or what to do. Any advice would be appreciated.
The usual cause of frequent crashes on Linux is due to a problem between Portaudio in Audacity and PulseAudio (the default sound system for most Linux distributions.
The easiest way round the problem is to tell Audacity to use your sound card directly through ALSA and not use Pulse. To do that, select the hardware options (shown as the name of the sound card followed by “hw:0” or similar) in the device toolbar. You would need to set the “hw” option for both recording and playback.
Limitations of this fix:
Unless your sound card has “hardware mixing” (which it probably does not) then you will not be able to run Audacity at the same time as any other audio application unless they are using different sound cards.