Application of effects crashes Audacity 1.3.12-2

[peter_n]

Having successfully used Audacity in a SimplyMepis linux distro a few years ago, I have just installed it in my current PCLinuxOS 2010.1 distro, but find that any attempt to apply an effect causes an immediate crash of Audacity. Re-starting Audacity gives me the option of restoring projects, but whether I carry out the restore or start again from scratch the same thing happens again. The effect I needed was 'Change Tempo', and the only way of avoiding the crash was to leave it set to 0.0% change, which wasn't much use!

My platform is a desktop PC with a VIA chipped ABIT KT7A non-RAID motherboard with AMD 1.4 Gigahertz Thunderbird processor (32-bit) and currently 512 MBytes of RAM, which is about to be expanded.

If anybody out there has come across any similar problem, I would be very grateful for any suggestions on dealing with it.

peter_n

[Gale Andrews]

"1.3.12-2" is possibly a build of Audacity supplied by your distribution, but it isn't supplied by us and I am not aware of a Change Tempo crash in our releases, which are strictly "source code only" for Linux.

If you quit Audacity, restart, Generate a 30 seconds tone and apply a -20% Change Tempo, does that crash (or does the alternative Effect > Sliding Time Scale crash with that experiment )? Is there something specific about the project you are working with that might causes a crash, such as only selecting a few milliseconds of audio, or having very long tracks, or applying very extreme tempo changes? Note that it is possible Sliding Time Scale might crash on very short selections or extreme settings, but we are working on that.

If you would like to test our current code, you can uninstall the 1.3.12-2 and compile Audacity from SVN HEAD.



Gale

[peter_n]

Thanks for your response. In answer to your first point, yes the version of Audacity I have at present was installed from the PCLinuxOS repositories.

I've tried the test with a 30 sec. tone with tempo shifted by 20%, and the crash happens exactly as before. Only by leaving the 'shift' at zero per cent can I avoid a crash. Even 0.5% crashes the application. I'll have a go at compiling from source as you suggest and see what happens then.

peter_n

[peter_n]

Gale, I've checked the Audacity download page as suggested, and note that the PCLinuxOS repositories don't go as far back as wxGTK 2.4 - in fact the lowest version is 2.6 and the installed version is 2.8. I'm not a systems specialist, so I am a bit reluctant to dig around in the libraries area, but would be glad if you could answer a couple of questions:

1) is the absence of the correct wxGTK library likely to cause the problem I reported, and

2) when is the next stable version of Audacity referred to on the download page expected to be available?

I'm not in panic mode, because my requirement is for language teaching purposes, and we're approaching the summer vacation period.

[Gale Andrews]

Gale, I've checked the Audacity download page as suggested, and note that the PCLinuxOS repositories don't go as far back as wxGTK 2.4 - in fact the lowest version is 2.6 and the installed version is 2.8. I'm not a systems specialist, so I am a bit reluctant to dig around in the libraries area, but would be glad if you could answer a couple of questions:

1) is the absence of the correct wxGTK library likely to cause the problem I reported, and

2) when is the next stable version of Audacity referred to on the download page expected to be available?

1.3.12 requires wxGTK 2.8.10 - it is 1.2 that requires wx GTK 2.4. If you click Help > About Audacity and click the "Build Information" tab, what is the stated wxWidgets library under "Core Libraries"? If it's 2.8.10 (or 2.8.11) that should be OK.

We don't know exactly when the next "stable" release of Audacity will occur. 1.3 is now a very mature Beta and 1.3.13 (SVN) fixes additional bugs. If I was you I would uninstall the Audacity package, compile Audacity from SVN HEAD and see if you get the crash then. If not, report the problem to your distribution. Launching the Audacity package from a console and giving them the console error when it crashes may help them a little.



Gale

[peter_n]

Thanks for your prompt reply to my last post. On checking the build details I found that the wxGTK library was in fact 2.8.10 with unicode enabled, but I also noticed that whereas About Audacity/Build Information lists libsamplerate under the 'core libraries' heading, the corresponding name in the PCLinuxOS repository is libsamplerate0. Is this variation likely to be significant?

[Gale Andrews]

I also noticed that whereas About Audacity/Build Information lists libsamplerate under the 'core libraries' heading, the corresponding name in the PCLinuxOS repository is libsamplerate0. Is this variation likely to be significant?

The truncation of the 0 in the build information is not significant, but the fact that PCLinuxOS is compiling Audacity with Libsamplerate rather than the Libresample (which SVN would use by default) could be relevant. There are some known crashes in the Play-at-Speed slider at very slow playback speeds if you use Libsamplerate.

When you apply Change Tempo, does your project rate bottom left of the Audacity screen match with the track rate in Hz given above the mute/solo buttons? If not, does changing the project rate to the track rate stop the crash?

Note you should not load any closed source plug-ins in Audacity at runtime if you choose to use libsamplerate (or an Audacity package that uses it). The author of libsamplerate imposes that restriction, which is why Audacity doesn't use that library.



Gale

[steve]

the fact that PCLinuxOS is compiling Audacity with Libsamplerate rather than the Libresample (which SVN would use by default) could be relevant. There are some known crashes in the Play-at-Speed slider at very slow playback speeds if you use Libsamplerate.

That's interesting, I usually compile with Libsamplerate on Ubuntu, which could explain some of the occasional crashes, but on the whole it works fine.

[Gale Andrews]

I've tried the test with a 30 sec. tone with tempo shifted by 20%, and the crash happens exactly as before.

I tried compiling SVN on Ubuntu 10.04 --with-libsamplerate then generated a 44100 Hz 30 seconds tone and Changed Tempo several times by various amounts. I repeated those tests after changing project rate to 96000 Hz but did not receive any problems.



Gale

[peter_n]

In reply to Gale Andrews' posting of Fri Jul 16, 2010 10:21 pm, both rates are the same (44100 Hz) before trying to apply the tempo shift. I can't tell what happens to the project rate after I have clicked to apply the change, because the whole Audacity window simply disappears!