CRASH when using Effects

[wavdav]

hey, i used audacity for a couple years and havent had this problem before... now when i try to use any effects(amplify,change pitch etc) the program is closing most of the time.

...any help? thanks

ps. cool place here !

[steve]

Are you trying to use Audacity 1.2.6 on Vista or Win 7?

[wavdav]

1.2.3 on XP

[kozikowski]

Does it still work on any of the older shows? If you pull down the six second piano solo from here...

http://www.kozco.com/tech/piano2.wav

...and play it in a fresh Audacity, is it still unstable?

You can also get ratty operation if you added new filters or plugins. Did you? Can you temporarily pull them out of the plugins folder and see if it's better?

You don't fall into the perfect candidate for a software upgrade, but you're close. Download and install Audacity 1.3.12 from here...

http://audacityteam.org/download/

You can have both versions on your machine, but only use one at a time. Audacity 1.3 projects will not open in 1.2.

Audacity 1.2, especially 1.2.3 is very old and no longer supported, updated or patched. If it becomes unstable, blow it away. You can still get Audacity 1.2.6 if you decide you just can't live with the newer version.

Koz

[kozikowski]

Since you have a "mature" machine, how full is your hard drive? Audacity will not run into a full or fragmented hard drive.

Koz

[wavdav]

Well i played that piano clip in Audacity 1.2.3, used the same effects and couldn't get the program to shut down so... ?
There are no plugins or filters added that i know of.

If i downloaded the new Audacity could i transfer over my old projects ?

[kozikowski]

It is intended that all the old Audacity 1.2 projects open in Audacity 1.3.12. In any event, you can have both versions installed, just don't try to use both at once.

If you have "magic" sound files, it's possible both versions will be unstable.

What kind of shows are you trying to edit?

Koz

[kozikowski]

You can get your symptoms with memory errors. Audacity might be the only application you have that tries to use all the machine memory it can get. It's not unusual for a bad memory stick in high memory to go unnoticed for a long time -- until you try to do effects on a large Audacity show.

Microsoft makes a very nice memory tester.

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

Run it multiple times. Sometimes memory errors don't show until two or three passes.

Koz

[wavdav]

I went ahead and downloaded the new Audacity 1.3.12, opened a project that i had done on 1.2.3 and there was NOTHING in the audio tracks.. just flat line. So i closed 1.3.12, went back to 1.2.3 and the project wouldn't open so.... i guess i lost the project?