Version 3.4.2 hangs on Fedora 38

[osioda]

I’ve used Audacity on and off for years. I have a new installation of the 3.4.2 appimage on Fedora 38, and it hangs on startup every time.

Output from running via the command line:

$ ./audacity-linux-3.4.2-x64.AppImage 
/lib64/libatk-1.0.so.0
/lib64/libatk-bridge-2.0.so.0
/lib64/libcairo-gobject.so.2
/lib64/libcairo.so.2
/lib64/libgio-2.0.so.0
/lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0
/lib64/libgmodule-2.0.so.0
/lib64/libgobject-2.0.so.0
/lib64/libgthread-2.0.so.0
/usr/lib64/pipewire-0.3/jack/libjack.so.0
/lib64/libpixman-1.so.0
findlib: libportaudio.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/home/sean/tmp/audacity-linux-3.4.2-x64.AppImage: Using fallback for library 'libportaudio.so'
/tmp/.mount_audaciPV75Ph/bin/audacity: /tmp/.mount_audaciPV75Ph/lib/libselinux.so.1: no version information available (required by /lib64/libgio-2.0.so.0)

Any help on diagnosing the problem would be much appreciated.

[osioda]

I found what I believe to be the problem.

When audacity was hanging, there was no microphone defined in the system. Since the machine is a desktop without a microphone, I would not expect there to be one in the software. However, when I tweaked pipewire to add a virtual microphone audacity suddenly started up properly.

So there appears to be a bug in audacity that causes it to hang if no microphone is defined.