Waveform doesn't always show - what am I doing wrong?

[Corvinus]

Hello, newbie here, and very pleased with Audacity.

The waveform is displayed for some track but not others; when it is not displayed, I have the oblique gray/blue bars typical of the initial display when track is being loaded and analysed (see picture). However, if I zoom in (with ctrl+1), I will eventually get to a point where the full waveforms are displayed.

I have no such problem for other types of display: spectrum and pitch are fine.

I have tried the safer/faster import/export options with no luck. I have also seen that it's possible to force Audacity to recompute the waveform, but only managed to make this happen once: I saw the message in the status bar, but nothing changed on the display.

I just cannot work out what I am doing wrong. I'm working on the 1.3.12 beta under Windows XP SP3 if that's any help.

[Gale Andrews]

The shaded bars only occur when you use On-Demand Loading; and if you set the Import/Export Preferences to "Make a copy of uncompressed audio files... (slower)" then On-Demand will be disabled.

I suggest you try 1.3.13 alpha which has a possible fix for a few cases where on-demand computation seems to stall when importing multiple files. To use that, extract the contents of the zip to a new folder and double-click audacity.exe from that new folder to launch it. It will not affect any installation of 1.3.x Beta you may already have.

Please let us know if 1.3.13 fixes the problem.



Gale

[Corvinus]

Thanks Gale. I tried it... and promptly lost the project I had trouble with And now I can't recreate the problem in 1.3.12 beta... On the positive side, I can't recreate it in 1.3.13 alpha either.

And that also affects another problem I was going to ask about when I try to extend a small label backwards, I get an instant crash. I had that in both versions. Will try have rebuild the project to recreate the bug, but not "joy" yet.

[Gale Andrews]

On the positive side, I can't recreate it in 1.3.13 alpha either.

Let us know if the problem reappears in in 1.3.13 when you have Preferences set to "read directly".

when I try to extend a small label backwards, I get an instant crash. I had that in both versions. Will try have rebuild the project to recreate the bug, but not "joy" yet.

Do you mean that you have a label that defines a region then drag it leftwards to contract it? By "label" I mean what you get if you CTRL + B.



Gale

[Corvinus]

Gale, that is almost correct. I have a label (did it with ctrl+B). It defines a small region (a few 1/10s). Of course, I zoom appropriately to see what I am doing. I grab the left handle to expand it, i.e., it starts earlier but the end point remains the same, to approximately 2s duration. Audacity crashed when I released the mouse. This happened consistently with one particular label, in the same project that I had the waveform display problems with.

But it hasn't happened since I recreated the project. I will post back in this see these bugs again.

[kozikowski]

Where did you get the show from? Is this you playing the guitar and singing in front of a microphone?

Koz