Slight lag in OSX

[theseus75]

@Koz - Maybe there's a shorter version; are you thinking it has to do with a blown installation? If so, perhaps uninstalling and then reinstalling with, say, not having other stuff open, etc. Being that install time is minimal, I certainly haven't thought about installing it without the usual email, browser, Quinn, etc open.

[kozikowski]

The external thing is handy because it carries no baggage from the old install at all, and doesn't disturb anything you already did.

There are hunt and peck ways around this. It takes longer. Have you ever run the "Periodic" tools on your Mac? If you have a very active machine, that will slow you down.

How about Go > Utilities > Disk Utilities > Verify Disk? You need at least 15% to 10% of the drive free to do any kind of production.

You are up to the point where you are going to need to tell us the real numbers when you Apple > About This Mac.

Koz
Mac Mini 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo
Tiger OS-X 10.4.11
Audacity 1.3.12
2GB memory

[kozikowski]

There is another tool that may be useful. Go > Utilities > Activity Monitor. That will sit in the corner and monitor the activity of various parts of your machine as you work. If you discover the hard drive goes nuts when you sweep the cursor around, then the drive may be in trouble -- or you may be running out of space. Etc.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

Have you made any changes to screen refresh rates?

How would I do that?

On Mac I don't know, but on Windows every onboard video card I have ever had has a control panel where you can choose refresh rates for the monitor (assuming you install the manufacturer's video drivers). You can also get utilities that will try to "tweak" refresh rate further and other things like advanced colour settings, but those often cause problems.

The fact it happens on Bill's machine on earlier OS X makes me think it's probably a wxMac thing. How much do Macs vary in terms of the video card? Is it always "onboard only" or does theseus75 have an added third-party video card?

While it could be lack of system resources I somewhat doubt it - Windows is usually much more prone to this sort of problem than Mac and even dragging the waveform at 100% CPU on Win 7 I see no lag. Does this happen even on 1 minute of audio?


Gale

[billw58]

Gale:
Yes, there is a Refresh Rate option in the Displays preferences panel, but for my display (Apple 23" Cinema Display with DVI connection) it is greyed out. My display is set to 1920 x 1200.

-- Bill

[kozikowski]

It's not that hard.

Apple > System Preferences > Hardware > Displays

Pick any resolution from 640 x 480 to to the maximum your system will do (I show nine variations) and choose the colour profile (CIE-RGB, SMPTE-C, sRGB IEC61966-2.1, etc). You may not get the refresh rate listings past 60Hz if the card won't do it. If you have an off-laptop display, you get two panels and you get to mess with them both individually.

Last week, I plugged my MacBook Pro into the Christie Motion Picture Projector in one of the two theaters and we watched a movie DVD full-frame 35 feet across. I didn't bring popcorn.

That's not what's wrong. Macs have been able to do this gracefully forever.

Assuming the Mac is healthy.

By the sudden clap of silence, I'm betting I hit it and I'm also betting that their hard drive was out of room. Macs don't have that little Disk Activity Light and it drives me nuts.

Koz

[billw58]

@Koz:
So you're saying that you don't see any delay between moving the editing cursor and the selection following the cursor as shown in the OP's video?

My hard drive has lots of free space, but that shouldn't be a factor in this situation anyway. Audacity doesn't need to do disk accesses to make a selection. I run Activity Monitor all the time, and I see no CPU hogs. Audacity is getting as much CPU time as it needs. As I pointed out in my previous post, I can't change the screen refresh rate for my display. I don't see how that could help, as the lag we see in the video is many times the refresh rate. Also, the OP sees no lag when running Windows on his iMac using the same display, thus the same video driver with the same refresh rate.

I see the same effect when using Fission (but not as bad), but Fission tries to play from the cursor, so is always jumping around the audio file while you're dragging the cursor, so this may not be directly comparable. I have no other audio editors to test with.

@Gale
Yes, I see the effect when I generate a 10-second track of noise and test with that. The effect appears to be independent of zoom level.

-- Bill

[theseus75]

@Gale - I'm running Max OSX Snow Leopard on my iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2gb 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Onboard video only - nothing after-market. I get the same lag with any length of audio, as well. I can tell a slight difference in, say, scrolling through the whole file when I have something longer than a half-hour, but the selector lag is the same throughout.

@Koz - I've got 60gb of 320gb unused, and watching Activity Monitor doesn't seem to generate any spikes when moving the playhead around.


iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Snow Leopard OSX Version 10.6.4
Audacity 1.3.12-Beta (Unicode)
2Gb Memory

[Gale Andrews]

My point about the refresh rate was really that if it was set to something that the monitor doesn't support properly, odd behaviour could easily follow.

How about Garage Band - you can import audio files on that. Or how about Macsome (free and I presume lightweight as it only works with AAC and MP3).



Gale

[kozikowski]

<<<So you're saying that you don't see any delay between moving the editing cursor and the selection following the cursor as shown in the OP's video?>>>

I do. The display is one or two refreshes behind the cursor. An action that can be described as "snappy." Nothing remotely as sloppy as the poster's video.

One of the productions has an iMac in their viewing room.....

Koz