Opening project hangs Audacity 1.3.7

[dgersic]

I have two projects here now that when I open them, Audacity hangs. It gets as far as drawing the audio image, greys out the menus, does *not* pop up the "Inspecting..." window, and hangs itself. I have to kill it to recover.

I recorded all of my vinyl (several hundred albums) in Audacity 1.22. Then upgraded to 1.3.7. Now I'm starting to go through the edits, noise removal, song separation, etc.. So these were both 1.22 projects that were upgraded to 1.3.7 by being opened, then save-as into a new project name. I still have the unaltered 1.22 project files, but really don't want to have to throw away my edits and re-do them if I don't have to.

The system is OpenSuSE 11.1. Audacity is 1.3.7 built from the fullsource distribution.

Other projects open ok, so I don't think it's a problem with the system. Just these two projects (so far?) seem to be damaged somehow.

I can upload the projects if somebody wants to take a look at them. They're big, though (800M for one, 1.2G for the other), so I'm not going to upload them unless you want them.

[steve]

I have two projects here now that when I open them, Audacity hangs. It gets as far as drawing the audio image, greys out the menus, does *not* pop up the "Inspecting..." window, and hangs itself. I have to kill it to recover.

Ouch, that is nasty.
I agree with your assessment that there is probably some damage to these two projects, but Audacity should display an error rather than crash. A typical error message would indicate a line number of the AUP file where the problem is, and that gives you a chance to fix it, but just crashing is bad.

can upload the projects if somebody wants to take a look at them. They're big, though (800M for one, 1.2G for the other), so I'm not going to upload them unless you want them.

Don't bother. I doubt that anyone is keen on wading through that lot.

Audacity is 1.3.7 built from the fullsource distribution.

Ah, well that provides an option. Since you have successfully built from source, you should have no difficulty building the 1.3.8 version from cvs. This would hopefully provide you with a version of Audacity that fails the import gracefully with an error message rather than crashing.

The 1.3.8 alpha version of Audacity is the current development version, and is usually working code, though it does occasionally get broken. If it fails to build, it is worth leaving it for a few days then updating your cvs copy of the source code and trying again. The 1.3.8 alpha version contains a lot of bug fixes.

If you want to try this without damaging your current 1.3.7 installation, run "./configure" and "make" but do not "make install". You will then be able to run the 1.3.8 alpha version from where the binary has compiled (in the cvs download folder) without it being installed.

To obtain the source code from cvs, you need to have cvs installed, then use the command

Code: Select all

cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/audacity checkout audacity

(there is more information about cvs in the wiki - see here for a starting point http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... g_Audacity )

[dgersic]

Ouch, that is nasty.

Yeah, that's kinda what I thought. Fortunately, so far it's only two, and I have backups of the data, but I'll lose my edits if I go back, so I was hoping to find a way to fix them. Failing that, I'd at least like to let somebody have them so that they can fix whatever went wrong and damaged them.

Ah, well that provides an option. Since you have successfully built from source, you should have no difficulty building the 1.3.8 version from cvs. This would hopefully provide you with a version of Audacity that fails the import gracefully with an error message rather than crashing.

Ok, downloaded 1.3.8 source, but it doesn't build. ./configure ran ok, but make dies in .../taglib with:

make -C taglib
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/dgersic/tmp/audacity-src-1.3.8/audacity/lib-src/taglib'
cd . && /bin/sh /home/dgersic/tmp/audacity-src-1.3.8/audacity/lib-src/taglib/admin/missing --run aclocal-1.10
/home/dgersic/tmp/audacity-src-1.3.8/audacity/lib-src/taglib/admin/missing: line 52: aclocal-1.10: command not found
WARNING: `aclocal-1.10' is missing on your system. You should only need it if
you modified `acinclude.m4' or `configure.in'. You might want
to install the `Automake' and `Perl' packages. Grab them from
any GNU archive site.
cd . && /bin/sh /home/dgersic/tmp/audacity-src-1.3.8/audacity/lib-src/taglib/admin/missing --run automake-1.10 --foreign
/home/dgersic/tmp/audacity-src-1.3.8/audacity/lib-src/taglib/admin/missing: line 52: automake-1.10: command not found
WARNING: `automake-1.10' is missing on your system. You should only need it if
you modified `Makefile.am', `acinclude.m4' or `configure.in'.
You might want to install the `Automake' and `Perl' packages.
Grab them from any GNU archive site.
cd . && perl admin/am_edit
cd . && perl admin/am_edit Makefile.in
cd . && rm -f configure
cd . && make -f admin/Makefile.common configure
make[3]: Entering directory `/home/dgersic/tmp/audacity-src-1.3.8/audacity/lib-src/taglib'
# Unable to find autoconf!!
# Unable to find autoheader!!
# Unable to find autom4te!!
# Unable to find automake!!
# Unable to find aclocal!!
Can't open configure: No such file or directory.
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/dgersic/tmp/audacity-src-1.3.8/audacity/lib-src/taglib'
/bin/sh ./config.status --recheck
running CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/sh /bin/sh ./configure --disable-option-checking --prefix=/usr/local/ --with-wx-config=/usr/bin/wx-config --disable-sqlite --disable-external-libs --disable-alsa --disable-programs --with-pa-include=../portaudio-v19/include --cache-file=/dev/null --srcdir=. --no-create --no-recursion
/bin/sh: ./configure: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [config.status] Error 127
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/dgersic/tmp/audacity-src-1.3.8/audacity/lib-src/taglib'
make[1]: *** [taglib-recursive] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dgersic/tmp/audacity-src-1.3.8/audacity/lib-src'
make: *** [audacity] Error 2

[dgersic]

Ah, well that provides an option. Since you have successfully built from source, you should have no difficulty building the 1.3.8 version from cvs. This would hopefully provide you with a version of Audacity that fails the import gracefully with an error message rather than crashing.

Ok, I got 1.3.8 built by using ./configure --without-taglib but it does exactly the same thing that 1.3.7 does. I open the project, and it hangs itself here.

Screenshot - Audacity wedged

Screenshot.png (78.43 KiB) Viewed 2865 times

Note that the screen has drawn, and the menus are greyed out. I'd expect to see the little "inspecting..." window pop up here, but it doesn't. So any other ideas? I'd like to help with this if I can. I can recover my work, though it'll be a hassle, but I wouldn't want somebody else to get stuck with this without that option.

[steve]

Is there anything noticeably different about these two projects from all of the others?
Size? Location? anything at all?

Could you upload just the AUP file (not the 800MB of data). (If you zip it you should be able to upload it as an attachment to your post)

[dgersic]

Is there anything noticeably different about these two projects from all of the others?
Size? Location? anything at all?

Nope. But I don't really know what I'm looking for. They're xml files, but other than that, I don't see anything special about them.

Could you upload just the AUP file (not the 800MB of data). (If you zip it you should be able to upload it as an attachment to your post)

Sure, here you go. I've included the original *.aup files from Audacity 1.2.2, and the 1.3.7 ones that I edited that hang when opened. If you need the data, I can upload it to my webserver, but it'll take about 8 hours to upload, and however long it takes you to download 2G of project data.

[steve]

First off, I'm assuming that it is not simply that you are short on disk space. I presume that these (very large) projects are a similar size to others ones that work OK.

I don't know if this will work, but it's worth a try.

1) Make a copy of the folder "Delightfulee Morgan (Edits)_data" and rename it "test1_data"
2) Now download this attachment and unzip it.

test1.aup.zip

(17.77 KiB) Downloaded 187 times

The file "test1.aup" and the folder "test1_data" must be in the same directory.

3) Now try and open the file test1.aup with Audacity.
4) If it opens the display may be wrong, but ignore that for now and Save the project as test2.aup

With a lot of luck test2.aup will work.

[dgersic]

First off, I'm assuming that it is not simply that you are short on disk space. I presume that these (very large) projects are a similar size to others ones that work OK.

[email protected]:~/tmp> df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 182G 144G 30G 84% /

Yep, plenty of free space. Other projects open fine.

1) Make a copy of the folder "Delightfulee Morgan (Edits)_data" and rename it "test1_data"
2) Now download this attachment and unzip it.

The attachment test1.aup.zip is no longer available

The file "test1.aup" and the folder "test1_data" must be in the same directory.

3) Now try and open the file test1.aup with Audacity.
4) If it opens the display may be wrong, but ignore that for now and Save the project as test2.aup

Ok, that seems to have worked. I opened test1.aup ok. It prompted me to deal with extra files (Delete, Continue without delete, Close immediately). I went with "Continue", then saved as test2.aup. Test2.aup opened without incident and looks like it's ok. So looking at what changed in the aup file, it looks like you zeroed out some stuff, but I can't really tell what that stuff is for. Should I try the same changes on my other broken project?

When I closed test2.aup, I got a warning from Gnome that the application had crashed. It saved the (attached) log file. Since then, I've opened and closed test2.aup (without making any changes) a few times, and it hasn't done it again. I don't know if that's important.

[steve]

Ok, that seems to have worked

Excellent

It prompted me to deal with extra files (Delete, Continue without delete, Close immediately). I went with "Continue",

Good, while is was possibly safe to go with "Delete", not deleting gives the opportunity of another bite at the apple, whereas with "Delete", if you've not got it right straight away, then the data goes up in smoke. But that is why we were working with a copy.

So looking at what changed in the aup file, it looks like you zeroed out some stuff, but I can't really tell what that stuff is for. Should I try the same changes on my other broken project?

Certainly have a go (make sure it is with a copy of the data and not the real stuff).

I changed the name so that we were only using a-z, 0-9, - and _
Also, took out the envelopes, but left the envelope tags in place (the envelope points were doing nothing anyway as they were all set at 1.00000
Set the zoom level to a default and set the selection to nothing.
Basically taking out anything apart from the references to the data files.

When I closed test2.aup, I got a warning from Gnome that the application had crashed.

That doesn't surprise me at all. The project was still broken, but seems like, as I was hoping, stuck together just well enough to get your sound out.

We stress to people that the .AU files are not audio files - they are data files. The blue wave image is in there as well as the audio data, and who knows what else. With your "recovered" file some of that data would still be fictitious, which is why we saved the project as soon as possible with a different name.

There's no guarantee that rescuing the other project will also be successful, but after this first success there is at least some room for hope. Remember to cross your fingers when you go to open the modified project

[dgersic]

Certainly have a go (make sure it is with a copy of the data and not the real stuff).

I've been playing with this. I was able to recover the second project the same way, so that's good news. I'm trying to narrow down how they got broken now. If I can figure that out, I'll post an update.