Audacity Forum

Intel Mac OS X 10.4.11

Kinda new to Audacity and I've used it a couple of times on this specific computer but never have had this problem. Whenever I play ANY track, the tracking cursor that tells you what part of the waveform is playings lags behind the actual track that is playing. The track playing is fine, just like playing it from a media player, but the cursor is jumpy and is not smooth, like it was when I had it installed previously. Are there any fixes to this problem or should I download an earlier version?

Thank You

Do you have any other programs running in the background that could be using up CPU cycles? It sounds like something has changed and Audacity is having difficulty finding the time to update the display.

In the Finder, click on Go > Utilities then open "Activity Monitor". Click on the "CPU" column to sort processes by CPU usage. If the little arrow is pointing up, click again to make it point down. Now the "hungriest" processes will be at the top of the list. Open an Audacity project then arrange your windows to that the Activity Monitor window and the Audacity window are both visible. Play your Audacity project and watch the Activity Monitor window.

How many tracks does the problem project have? You say "whenever I play ANY track...", but you can't play just one track of an Audacity project without muting all the other tracks or soloing that one track. Is that what you're doing?

-- Bill

The only thing I have tried so far has been playing either a stereo or mono sound file (mp3, wav, etc) and the cursor is always jumpy.

I opened up the activity monitor as mentioned and the only 2 things taking up CPU resources and any considerable amount of memory was the activity monitor and audacity, lol. So I am just not sure what exactly is going on. I can use Garageband with no hitches after making several tracks and playing them all back.

When all else fails, try resetting the preferences. Instructions on where to find them and how to reset them are here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... references

-- Bill