Audacity Forum

Hi, I'd be grateful for any help you can offer.
I've just started to use Audacity.Version 1.2.6, downloaded yesterday
I have recorded music; edited; played it back; exported as MP3; and everything was great
Today, in the middle of playing back a newly recorded track, the music stopped!
Now it won't play anything back, and I can't record either - it both cases when I press "play" or "record", the curser stays put, and the green or red triangle flashes, as though it is trying to move forward but can't. ( I still have sound when using i-tunes)
Have I done something stupid?

Any ideas please?

thanks in advance,


barry

Good news - I think!

After turning my PC off, then on again, everything works just fine.

cheers,


barry

Before you get all joyful jumping up and downey, it crashed for a reason. Go into Audacity preferences Directories and see where it's set to put all its housekeeping files. That drive should be thoroughly defragged and have a lot of room on it. No production hard drive should ever drop below 10% of free space, and that space needs to be well-behaved, high quality space.

When was the last time you updated your virus protection and performed a manual system scan? Auto Everything is nice, but by definition, an auto scan has to miss everything you're doing at the time. Stop and close everything and do a comprehensive manual scan.

Koz

I have the same problem but a bit more weird: I tried to listen toshort wav files. Some of them sound ok and in others, the cursor is stuck. I am using a new PC (WIN XP) with a lot of space in the hard drives.

Can some one help ?

kozikowski wrote:Before you get all joyful jumping up and downey, it crashed for a reason. Koz

Actually Koz I'm not convinced.

As you probably know my PCs are well managed environments with plenty of free space, defragged very regularly, fast processor, plenty of RAM etc. etc. - but I sometimes I get this stuck cursor problem too, not very often but occasionally. And Audacity doesn't crash - it is still running - and you can reset parameters, save the project etc. - it just won't play or record, instead you get this funny flickering/stuttering cursor ....

And like the poster of this thread it is only a re-boot which sets everything ok again.

WC

So now I'm of two minds. Hard to do in one head, but here in California, we do wondrous things.

Does 1.3.x do it? Then the problem is dead because nobody is going to fix 1.2.

First, I've never had that happen on a Mac or Linux. Other problems, yes, but not that one. You know there's a way to reset the Windows Manager? There's a careful keystroke thing you can do that collapses the whole screen and makes Windows draw everything fresh...

I hit it by accident every so often and it's entertaining to watch.

A thought.

Koz

Koz,

Yup, it happened to me two days ago on 1.3.5 - I only started on 1.3.6 yesterday, so no data on that yet ....

WC

My version is the beta "Audacity ® 1.3.6 (Unicode)," and this problem happened to me during playback. In fact, I found this post by Googling for help with the problem. I'm glad to know there's something that works to cure it.

So what's the keystroke combination that makes Windows restart the desktop?

Koz

I'm not sure that this is the same problem, or just similar symptoms.
Occasionally Audacity will become unresponsive - this seems to happen when playback is stopped - there will still be a level indicated on the playback meter - the stop/play/pause buttons will be greyed out - menu items are not available, however, the "zoom out to full show" button will sometimes work after a couple of seconds, and then all will be back to normal. I'm not certain which versions this applies to as it has been an occasional fault in several versions.

kozikowski wrote:So what's the keystroke combination that makes Windows restart the desktop?

Alt+Ctrl+Del
but if you use that just once, you can bring up the Task Manager, and from there you can shut down Audacity without go straight to a reboot.