Sound cuts off on portable Macs

[Gale_Andrews]

Split from Could not Save Project. Perhaps Disk is Full - #21 by cyrano

@cyrano

After doing a couple of saves with minus signs in the filename, no more sound in Audacity. Only clicks when starting and stopping playback. Other apps are affected too.

After a trip to System prefs, where the first system sound tried clicks too, the second one works. Audacity still doesn’t play.

If after re-enabling sound, I go to another app and play something, Audacity’s sound is back too.

However, when I save without the minus sign, still no sound in Audacity. Other apps are no longer affected tho…

Apart from the bugs with specific characters, using non-ASCII characters does not case the save project problems. Nor do such characters cause audio failures.

I assume you have a battery-powered Mac, right? I think it’s trying to be too clever turning off the sound system to save power. Does Antipop help?


Gale

[cyrano]

@Gale Andrews

I assume you have a battery-powered Mac, right? I think it’s trying to be too clever turning off the sound system to save power.

Yes, but it was on mains power all the time. Besides, it only happens with Audacity, not with Boom Recorder, Sound Forge or Reaper. It’s a behviour that Audacity has shown for a long time. From 10.6.8 with Audacity 2.0.5 times. Can’t remember if it was like that before, because that period I was using SF Pro.

Does > Antipop > help?

Dunno. Never heard about Antipop. Thx for the tip. I’ll try it out in the next days and report back.

[cyrano]

First test with Audacity 2.1.2, Chrome with youtube and Reaper show no problem when running Antipop. Haven’t restarted or logged out yet, but I have saved several projects with dashes in the name.

Plugged in The RME interface - no problem there either.

Looks very promising. Thanks again for that tip, Gale!

Now i’m gonna torture this setup a little more.

[cyrano]

After some hours of testing, Audacity crashed when quitting. Had to kill it. Tried a number of times quitting again - no problem.

Checked the log in Audacity. Nothing.

When closing the log window with command + w, Audacity asked if I wanted to save. When I answered “No”, it didn’t close the log window, but it closed the (already saved) project window. Small bug there, I think.

Checked console. Output:

16/02/16 22:25:51,560 loginwindow[45]: Failed to write crash history to file:///Users/cyrano/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter/Audacity_C284D4F1-C083-529E-9A6A-544D9058AADF.plist.
16/02/16 22:25:51,584 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[220]: (net.sourceforge.audacity.138192[1792]) Exited: Terminated: 15

For the rest, no problems, even when the firewire cable dropped out. A rescan fixed that. Other apps seemed to pick up the reappearing RME automatically, tho.

All in all, Antipop is a pretty solid fix.

[Gale_Andrews]

@cyrano

When closing the log window with command + w, Audacity asked if I wanted to save. When I answered “No”, it didn’t close the log window, but it closed the (already saved) project window. Small bug there, I think.

I agree Firefox and Safari would close an active modeless window on COMMAND + W (close the front window) rather than close the main window. At least the Log does actually stay open.

If you want to discuss it, please start a new topic.


Gale