Audacity Forum

Hey everybody

Since I was not able to find any solution to my problem in the forum so far, I thought I post it. So here goes:

I have a rather new desktop PC. I'm running Windows 7 professional, 64 bit. The PC is way above the requirements and I have roughly 3.5 TB of disk space available. My sound drivers (on board audio) are the latest version from the mainboard manufacturer.

Still, Audacity (1.3.13) keeps crashing when I use effects. To be a little more specific: It crashes if an effect runs / executes for more than 5 seconds. I.e. it will show the progress bar (with time used / time remaining etc.) and without exception I will get the "unhandled exception" message always after passing the 5 second mark. No matter what I click then, the window whites out / stops responding and I get the Win 7 message that the software crashed.

I can't actually say whether this happens with all effects. So far I had the problem with normalization, equalizer and click filter.

I've been using 1.3.12. on my Laptop (also Win 7, 64bit) just fine, so I also tried this version on my desktop. Sadly, this did not change anything.

Any ideas what might be wrong here?

Thanks and best regards


Anselm

Have a look in "Edit > Preferences > Directories"
What do you have set for the "Temporary File Location"?
Ensure that "Play and/or Record using RAM" is NOT selected.

I didn't want to write to my SSD, so I adjusted this path after installation. It is set to a folder on my data drive (a Raid 0 array).

The RAM preference always seemed like a good thing to do (and it was as default, so I left it), since I have a lot of RAM and I thought it would make things faster... But it appears that you were right. I removed it and the issues stopped!

I hope I didn't miss some FAQ or asked something too obious here...

Thanks in any case!


Anselm

Glad you're up and running.
This issue is not in the FAQ because it does not come up very often.
"Play and/or Record using RAM" is disabled by default, but if it has ever been enabled in a previous version of Audacity the setting will carry over to any new installation. That setting is really only there to allow Audacity to work on old underpowered hardware and I'm not sure if it works at all on Windows 7 (I don't have Win 7 so I've never tried it).