Playback freezing & out of sync

[twilli]

I am a novice to audio editing and downloaded Audacity just yesterday. I don't want to do anything complicated, just want to create very basic mix cds using fade in/fade out capability. All was going well--I've been able to import and export tracks, convert tracks as necessary, import into itunes, etc.

However, I've been working on one mix, I guess it will be about 20-25 minutes long, and when I got to trying to import about the 9th or 10th track, I started having problems. I can import music and use the tools and effects with no problems, but the audio playback is skipping increasingly and keeps freezing up, to the point where I can no longer work with it. It got to the point where the tracks were even playing out of sync (i.e., although I'm attempting to play a single track it's overlapping itself and playing out of whack).

I thought originally that perhaps Audacity can only handle very short projects, or only a few tracks at a time, but I've seen where other folks have done significantly longer mixes. At one point I received an error message saying "error while opening sound device - check output device settings and project sample rate," but when I tried playing again the message went away and play began, albeit the skipping continued. I've tried changing the zoom, including fitting into the screen, as I've seen suggested elsewhere. I've also tried closing out of all of my other programs, so that nothing other than Audacity is open. I've kept the settings at Stereo, 44100 Hz. Still no luck.

Anyone have any suggestions? Appreciate the help.

Specs:
Audacity version: 1.2.5
MacBook
Mac OSx 10.5.7 (Leopard)
1.83 GHz Intel

[kozikowski]

First, you're in the wrong Audacity. Mac/Intel/Leopard pretty much killed off Audacity 1.2.5. There are known stability issues; I have two Macs of that configuration that have significant problems. So 1.3.7 is the only one left for us.

But that's not what happened to you. You ran out of drive space. How big is your hard drive and how much room do you have left? Select the drive icon in the upper right and Apple-I for the info panel.

Do you do any system maintenance? Periodic? Permissions? I get back of the envelope calculations of 5GB or 6GB of room for your show without special effects, backups, or UNDO. Those are extra. All that and 10% free space at all times. Live production take up a lot of room, and well behaved room, too.

Koz

[twilli]

Thanks for your response, Koz.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your post, I don't think drive space should be an issue. My capacity is 74.21 GB, I have 17.9 GB available. Everything is up to date on my computer as far as I know.

So, I also tried uninstalling the previous version of Audacity and downloaded the 1.3.7 version and starting over. Although I was able to get a little bit further this time before things went haywire, I basically had the exact same problem.

I was finally able to get done enough to export the file into itunes, and it played with no problem--no skips or anything were evident there--it's just the playback is so impossible in Audacity once I get to adding about the 12th or 13th track, that I can't really utilize it. I also tried saving the project and then emptying my history to see if that would help. Nope.

It's a bit frustrating.

[kozikowski]

You're running out of machine. There are certain machine resources needed to play one high-quality stereo track without stuttering. You need to add those same resources every time you add a track. It's not open ended.

Sooner or later you're going to need to play too many tracks for the machine to keep up. It's going to be off running bash, ntpd or nslookupd or one of the other things that it does and just not going to be back in time.

It's worth noting that Audacity is only good for 16 tracks, no matter what, so you're bumping right up against the program limit.

I bet I can help a little with machine maintenance.

Go > Utilities > Disk Utility >System Drive > Verify Disk (Don't repair it)
Go > Utilities > Disk Utility >System Drive > Repair Permissions

Download and run MacJanitor. It's free. It will clean up large slow logging files and can speed up a machine. Or you can do the cleanup manually in Terminal if the command line doesn't scare you. It can take hours if you've never done it.

Unplug the network and/or turn off Airport while you're editing.
Close all other applications. I regularly "fix" some computers at work by closing fifteen or twenty running applications and restarting.

Koz