Time-wasting buggy behaviour

[chinton]

I have had Audacity on my Mac for some time now, and even though it is free, have finally become irritated enough with its bugs to say something. This is 1.2.6 running under Tiger on a Mac G4.

1. When you select a section of audio and then try to perform an action on it like delete, cut, fade in or out, it only works about 1 in 10 times. The normal thing I have to do is select an area, hit delete, it doesn't do anything, so select it again, and eventually I'll get a selection that deletes. This wastes so much time.

2. The transport buttons only work about half the time, and randomly clicking around in the audio waveform will eventually cause the play button to do something when you click it, but there's no rhyme or reason to it.

3. When it is in that weird mode that none of the transport buttons work and selections will not delete, all the menu items are greyed out too.

So, a 10-second task takes half an hour...I wouldn't dream of using this software seriously. I only have it on a machine I don't have a full-fledged audio editor on, for making mp3 audio clips for the web, and it would be awfully nice if it worked. For my purposes all it needs to do is trim ends and fade in and out.

[kozikowski]

<<<I wouldn't dream of using this software seriously. >>>

I would definitely stop using it. If it's causing you that much trouble, it's totally not worth messing with.

Did you try "reinstalling" by deleting the audacity.cfg file and resetting your Preferences? Go > Home > Library > Application Support. Trash the whole Audacity folder and restart the machine. Audacity should ask you "English?" when it starts the next time. Your install may have this stuff in a slightly different place.

That whole thing and you never introduced us to where you got the show from. We need the beginning of the movie. Audacity doesn't always behave very well with foreign file formats. Are you singing into a microphone? Who made the microphone?

Do you run MacJanitor and/or run the Periodic tools from the command line? How full is your hard drive and has this ever worked? Verify Disk and Repair Permissions? Any of that?

Koz

[chinton]

Did you try "reinstalling" by deleting the audacity.cfg file and resetting your Preferences?

No, but I'll try and see if it helps.

I'm wondering if this is some sort of window focus bug, because sometimes if I click the Audacity window, then click the Finder, then click back on Audacity, things start to behave again (but sometimes they don't, so probably a red herring).

Audacity doesn't always behave very well with foreign file formats.

They are all perfectly normal 16-bit stereo aiff files.

Do you run MacJanitor and/or run the Periodic tools from the command line?

No.

How full is your hard drive

Plenty of space on the hard drive.

has this ever worked?

No, never reliably, in fact things that do work rarely work twice in a row, even the transport controls, like I said.

[kozikowski]

<<<No, but I'll try and see if it helps.>>>

It's as close as you can get to completely reinstalling the software without actually taking the program out of /Applications. You will need to put your preferences back in again and I would start with 44100, 16-bit, Stereo, unless you have a very specific reason not to. OS-X had hard times dealing with 24-bit, and other applications have trouble with 32-bit.

<<<They are all perfectly normal 16-bit stereo aiff files. >>>

We like extreme granularity when we're chasing a problem. Open up one of the files in QuickTime Player and Apple-I INFO. What does QT think the files are? Read that panel.

<<<No.>>>

MacJanitor is free and works really well, but if you're up to it and you have a half-hour to kill, open up Go > Utilities > Terminal and type...

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly [enter]

You don't get SpellCheck® here, so check your work carefully.

This is a heavy System Level Command, so the System will ask you for your password. It could take up to a half-hour to do this, particularly if you've never done it. It cleans up all your logging files and stores them and starts many of them fresh. It does a number of other housekeeping chores. Highly recommended. It happens completely automatically at 4AM if you never put your computer to sleep and leave it lit up. We have one of the digital Flame setup techies that does this. Nobody else I know is that crazy.

<<<Plenty of space on the hard drive.>>>

Granularity, please. How large is each mounted drive and how much free space is there? No external FireWire drives or mounted USB drives? Thumb drives?

Do you ever restart your machine from power off -- no power plug?

How many applications do you have open while you use Audacity? We have two artists that complain about instability and I cure it every time by closing the first 30 applications they leave running.

Go > Utilities > Disk Utility > Your System Drive

Run Verify Disk (do not fix anything)
Repair Permissions

If any of these messages fails or turns red, do tell us.

Give me a feeling for what you do on your machine. Skype, Photoshop, DVD Player, Web Site Creation? Play back to me one typical day. I have almost your exact machine and I do(did) commercial recording on it all the time. I don't know that it ever crashed or behaved in a crazy manner. Sometimes I behaved in a crazy manner, but that's not Audacity's problem.

Koz

[steve]

I can't be sure if this is your problem, but there have been some "focus" related bugs in Audacity which have been fixed in Audacity 1.3.8 which is due for release later this month.