Audacity 1.3.12 Crashing while recording on G5 powerpc

[RoughDraftMe]

Hello,

Audacity is working fine in every respect except recording- when recording, the program crashes every time within a span of 10-50 seconds.

My machine is a G5 powerPC running OS 10.5.8, Dual 1.8ghz, 4 gigs of RAM, plenty of harddrive space.

My recording interface is a Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56 connected to the computer via firewire and utilizing Focusrite's Saffire MixControl ver. 2.2

The problems began after concurrently updating Audacity from 1.3.10 and the Saffire MixControl from an earlier version, I think 1.0 (definitely not prior to 1.8). My reason for the sudden simultaneous updating was that until a few weeks ago my machine wasn't connected to the internet.

Since everything worked well before these updates, I do have the option of downgrading my software either one at a time or both together in order to figure out where the problem might be and/or to get the computer back into working order in the event that a solution can't be found. Of course, I'd first like to see if anyone might have an idea of what could be causing the problem, or at least some tips to aid in finding the cause.

Thank you very much

[kozikowski]

This could be a normal equipment or software failure, but...

I can give you a reading from the video editing forums. It's considered bad form to upgrade a PowerPC machine past Tiger OS-X 10.4. It doesn't fail outright and turn into a steaming pile of poo, but over months of postings and complaints, we found people with Leopard on PPC machines were not unconditionally stable. Edits and resource management would fail and nobody could ever figure out why. For most people, it worked out just fine and they lost no time posting that we were crazy, but as crazy we we appeared to be, we couldn't make that small but significant bunch of unlucky editors go away.

Welcome to the bunch.

You have enough room and all, but have you ever done the Periodic tools or done Verify Disk and Repair Permissions? Sound/Video Editors have resource needs beyond most programs. Did you buy the memory in your machine separate, or did it come in the machine new? There is a hardware memory tester you can run to make sure. I'll see if I can find it.

Even if all the hardware systems are up to snuff, it gives us a good base to work from. You do take the machine apart regularly and clean it, right? If it's an upright G5, it comes apart easily and all the shields pull out for vacuuming.

Koz

[kozikowski]

http://www.memtestosx.org/joomla/index.php

A G5 fan system will slowly go up to emergency cooling speed mode when you run this test because the machine is running with no cabinet management. Try to go through two passes of the test.

Koz

[RoughDraftMe]

Thanks for responding.

It had been at least 7 months since I last verified and repaired permissions, so I just did that and everything checked out. The RAM was bought separately, about a year ago. Before that, and before I owned the machine, it had 2 GB of RAM. However, I've never had trouble with the memory before, and never any crashes with any program, with the exception of recording with audacity now after updating. I last cleaned out the case about a month ago. I upgraded to OS 10.5 about a year ago when I got the machine, and have never had any problems.

[kozikowski]

Like I said, that's probably not it, but editors and some instances of Photoshop are the only programs that actively and regularly use all available memory. They're coal mine canaries and will spot a failing memory stick before anything else.

when recording, the program crashes every time within a span of 10-50 seconds.

That's Audacity filling up the memory and not writing the work to the hard drive. Look in Audacity Preferences and see where on the drive(s) Audacity is trying to put stuff. You might try moving that location to somewhere that is without question Not Magic, like /Users/koz/Documents or something like that. If Audacity starts working, check that the old location has appropriate permissions -- or is even there any more.

Do you have partitions and is Audacity's partition running out of space?

Koz

[kozikowski]

Restart Audacity is you make any serious changes like that.
Koz

[billw58]

First I have to disagree with Koz on one point. I've been running 10.5.8 on my dual 2 GHz G5 without a hiccup. I've also been using Audacity 1.3.12 and the 1.3.13 alpha builds, all without crashes. So I don't suspect that 10.5.8 is the culprit. I'd focus on the Focusrite.

To determine if the problem is with Audacity or the Focusrite we need to test the Focusrite with different recording software. SndSampler is a venerable shareware sound recorder and editor that you can download and try for free. http://www.sndsampler.com/

-- Bill

[RoughDraftMe]

I moved the temp directory to the Doc folder, turned on the interface, and recorded 3 tracks without any issue past the 2 minute mark before stopping. However, I then opened up a project I've been working on and attempted to record, but Audacity froze immediately and then crashed, without recording at all.

[RoughDraftMe]

I'm downloading SndSampler right now, I'll let you know how things go. My suspicion has also been the Focusrite, namely the software needed to run it.

[billw58]

When all else fails, reset the prefereces

Only half joking. Random problems like this (including old projects crashing but new projects working, plus the strangeness of the location of the temp directory making a difference) often respond to clean preferences.

With Audacity not running ...

Go to ~/Library/Application Support/audacity/

Open the file "audacity.cfg" in TextEdit.

Remove everything except "NewPrefsInitialized=1" and save without changing the extension.

Start Audacity and see what happens.

-- Bill