YES, it crashes constantly on Mac OSX

[kozikowski]

<<<Fix it or kill it. Please.>>>

Or stop using it.

Koz

[unclex]

I just downloaded and ran Macjanitor...
Nothing seems to be wrong, from what I can tell.
I wasn't aware it was a GOOD thing to leave your computer on all night sometimes...

[unclex]

KOZ, I CAN'T use it!

That's why I'm on this forum!

And that's not really a solution to the problem is it?
... if software is meant to be used.

<<<Fix it or kill it. Please.>>>

Or stop using it.

Koz

[steve]

I can imagine just how frustrating this is for you and am sorry that I cannot offer much assistance (ex-Windows user, now on Linux, never had a Mac of any sort).

I am both surprised and disappointed that you are having so much trouble with Audacity (as no doubt are you). I have seen posts from other Mac Mini users (mostly about how to record "Stereo Mix"), that have no trouble with stability, so there is no obvious reason why you should be having such problems.

I did read your earlier comment that you do not run Audacity with other applications open, but I thought it still worth mentioning the Firefox Flash plug-in issue because that particular problem can persist even after Firefox has been closed (hence starting Audacity after a cold boot so as to ensure that the Flash plug in has not been started). I did not think this to be a very likely cause of the problem, but you and Koz seem to have covered nearly every other option without success.

In many ways your set-up sounds near ideal - plenty powerful enough, little else running, known to be stable with applications that are at least as demanding as Audacity... and yet it crashes. In the past there have been problems on Macs running Audacity with 24 bit files. Again I don't think that this is very likely to be the problem, but there has to be some reason.

Perhaps Koz and yourself could try and set up the perfect, most stable install of Audacity on a MacMini, using the most reliable version of Audacity for this machine, and all of the best fail-safe settings. (If that does not work I would probably give up and try again when Audacity 2.0 is released).

[kozikowski]

<<<I wasn't aware it was a GOOD thing to leave your computer on all night sometimes...>>>

Sometimes, but you don't have to.

Just to be clear. Mac OS-X is based on a super-stable UNIX operating system, not the older Mac-OS home-built service. This caused a number of really good things to happen. All the techies and engineers immediately went out and bought Macs. I'm not kidding. One of the heavy Systems Operators at work sets up his Mac entirely from the Terminal command line. No pretty pictures at all.

Code: Select all

========================================
Last login: Sun Jul 26 13:43:09 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
jimmy:~ koz$ pwd
/Users/koz
jimmy:~ koz$ ls -al
total 72
drwxr-xr-x    21 koz   koz      714 Jul 25 20:56 .
drwxrwxr-t     6 root  admin    204 Mar 24  2007 ..
-rw-r--r--     1 koz   koz        3 Nov  3  2006 .CFUserTextEncoding
-rw-r--r--     1 koz   koz    12292 Jul 25 20:59 .DS_Store
drwx------     2 koz   koz       68 Jul 26 13:58 .Trash
-rw-------     1 koz   koz     4605 Jul 26 10:49 .bash_history
drwxr-xr-x   118 koz   koz     4012 Dec  6  2008 .dvdcss
-rw-r--r--     1 koz   koz       26 Dec 10  2007 .lpoptions
=======================================

Understand any of that?

I don't either.

Another thing that happened was extreme stability. I think it's still true that a majority of the computers running the internet use a variety of UNIX. No small thing that. This is why when you said you had managed to destroy the operating system, it did get my attention. That's hard, but not impossible to do.

Another thing that happens is the natural housekeeping that UNIX has built-in. If you never touch a UNIX machine in an unkind way, it will manage and clean up after itself seemingly forever. There is a UNIX command called "uptime." It will tell you how long the machine has been running without a break. Nobody is startled at an uptime value of six months. We have multiple machines like that at at work. There are UNIX machines with uptime values in years.

It's against this background that you arrived complaining about crashing right and left, programs halting, and very serious instability.

What's wrong with this picture?

The first line of defense is to make sure the machine itself is in perfect working order. You do need to go through all the steps to insure that because problems in the weirdest places can cause UNIX to go face-first into the mud. It's only afterward we get to determine where the toxic combination of software or setups is.

You may be valuable as a test bench. It won't do your sound production the slightest bit of good, but it might help the Mac Audacity developer (1) figure out what the problem is.

Koz

[Leland]

Fix it or kill it. Please.

Trying to fix it. It would help greatly if you could try out one of the latest test builds from here:

http://audacity.homerow.net/index.php?dir=mac

Scroll to the bottom and pick the most current.

Thanks,

Leland

[nxpnsv]

For me it was a VST effect causing the same problem. The only solution was to remove it. To find out move files from your /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST/ to some other directory. If Audacity starts add files back until you find the VST. If you can live with out it the problem is solved.
.nxpnsv