JACK dies, Audacity hangs, no PortAudio, etc...

[FabricioRocha]

Hi everyone. I am having a bad, bad time with Audacity, something which never happened in my 7 or more years as a Linux user.

The box is a Debian Lenny machine with a stock 2.6.31.1 kernel compiled with low latency and an Audigy 2ZS soundcard. Here are the issues:

1) JACK (0.116.2+svn) and Audacity will NOT work together. If JACK is running and I open Audacity, hundreds of xruns are generated, even after Audacity is loaded, up to the point that JACK and QJackCtl are killed automatically. It will happen everytime, with Audacity configured to use JACK as a device, or ALSA as well.

2) The Devices configuration dialog shows me "using PortAudio V19-devel...." but I don't have PortAudio installed here. Is it statically linked in Audacity? Or, because I don't use PortAudio, might that be a source of the problems?

3) Audacity hangs whenever I am trimming clips (specially after I select a section in the end of the timeline), or after recording a section of audio. CPU usage rockets to 100%, some menus can be viewed but most items are greyed out. I disabled VAMP plugins, but this didn't help. Sometimes (rarely, indeed) it will go back to normality if I click "rewind" then "play". But Audacity does not become a zombie, because clicking in the X button for closing the window brings the "do you want to save the file before closing?" dialog. I suspect there is an endless loop somewhere...

Those problems happened with versions 1.3.5 (Debian stable repositories) and 1.3.9-5 (unstable). Please, any clues??

Thanks and regards!

Fabricio

[jademan]

... Please, any clues??

FabricioRocha,

I'm a Windows user, not either a Linux or a JACK user, but I did locate, as you say, some clues.

On the Release Checklist, Search for "JACK issues". There are some links there that might prove illuminative. heck these out, then please report back.

I hope this helps.

[steve]

I'm on Ubuntu 9.04 with ALSA, PulseAudio and Jack installed.
With Audacity 1.3.9 and 1.3.10 (cvs) I can get Audacity to work with Jack, but only if I follow a rather convoluted path. The rest of the story is here: http://n2.nabble.com/Fwd-Re-Jackd-works ... l#a3600099

There has always been trouble with Audacity and Jack - at least in part it is because of the three way deal Audacity/PortAudio/Jack.
Audacity uses PortAudio to provide cross-platform support, and it has been suggested that it may require a concerted effort from all 3 parties working together to ultimately solve the issue.