Audacity Forum

Dear Gale,

a P.S. since I've got your ear--

Bug in Audacity 1.3.5:

The temporary directory should NOT be default-named ".audacity_temp" ; Audacity to fail with a directory-not-found error (on my MacIntel running 10.4.11). Starting a file name with dot on a Mac is considered bad form. Usually it doesn't create problems, but in this case it does. Telling Audacity to name the directory "audacity_temp" instead fixes the problem.


pax / Ctein

Hi

Audacity is as I thought pretty much hard coded to meter two channels (meaning 1 and 2 if there are more than two). It would be something we'd want to improve later on, at least letting it meter two assigned channels out of a number of them.

Leland (our Mac developer) will reply to you shortly about the temp files directory on Mac.


Gale

Dear Gale,

Thanks for settling this. I'll either grin and bear it or switch back to using CuBase (depends on which bothers me more, not having VU meters or not being able to save directly in flac format).

Look forward to hearing from Leland; glad to help out in any way I can. By the way, in case you couldn't figure it out (unlikely), there were a couple of words accidentally deleted from my previous post. The sentence should have read "... this causes Audacity to fail with a directory-not-found error..." What can I say; I'm a writer, not a copy editor [ wry smile ].


~ pax Ctein
[ please excuse any word salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's online Gallery http://ctein.com
-- Digital restorations http://photo-repair.com
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Hi pax,

The temporary directory should NOT be default-named ".audacity_temp" ; Audacity to fail with a directory-not-found error (on my MacIntel running 10.4.11). Starting a file name with dot on a Mac is considered bad form. Usually it doesn't create problems, but in this case it does. Telling Audacity to name the directory "audacity_temp" instead fixes the problem.

I've just removed the dot and committed the change. Although I did not receive the errors you mentioned and don't consider it bad form myself, there are reasons a user may want to use Finder and the like to access the Audacity temp folder. Having it hidden can most certainly be a pain.

Thanks for the heads up.

Leland

Dear Leland,

In case this proves to be useful, let me describe my environment and the nature of the bug in more detail. This occurs on a Macbook Pro (Core Duo 2.0 GHz) running MacOS X 10.4.11 with 4 GB of RAM. My Audacity scratch directory is not on the system volume.

If the name of the scratch directory begins with a dot, then after 15-20 minutes of recording, Audacity starts to throw up a directory-not-found error. If I remove the dot, Audacity runs fine (well, at least out to an hour recording; I haven't tried anything longer than that).

So, you may not have seen the error because it's peculiar to my system, it doesn't happen if you write the scratch directory to the system volume, or you didn't run the recording long enough. Or door number four. Who knows? Not me!

It's not uncommon for third-party software to name files and directories starting with a dot, but hard disk checking/repair utilities for the Mac will flag such things as not conforming to correct Mac practice. This may be an example of the reason why.

Anyway, kudos for the instant bug fix!

(By the way, FYI, "pax" is not a name but a sign-off, like "sincerely" or "yours truly". It's Latin.)

~ pax Ctein
[ please excuse any word salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's online Gallery http://ctein.com
-- Digital restorations http://photo-repair.com
======================================

Ctein,

I recall now we did have a couple of instances last month of "unable to open temp files - no such file or directory" errors after recording for a while. They were both on MacBook Pros (Intel). So with hindsight that may have been the same problem.

This is probably born of ignorance of Mac, but when you say you need to write the Audacity temporary directory to a system volume, do you mean simply avoid writing to a hidden file with a ".", or are you talking about having to write to a local drive rather than an external or network one (the latter being a bad idea for speed-of-access reasons anyway)?


Gale

Dear Gale,

No, that's a misread-- it is definitely NOT necessary to write the temp directory to the system volume. In fact, I never do that. I was only noting as that since I hadn't tested that case, it's possible the dot-name problem doesn't appear if one does so.

This is the first time I've run across a dot-name-related error. In fact, lots of Microsoft software creates dot stuff and it doesn't break (no, I'm not holding them up as examples of good programming practices [s]). But in this case, it's easily and quickly provable that the dot-name created a problem.

I agree that network storage might present performance problems. For similar reasons, I'd recommend against USB-2, because it's CPU-moderated. If one's not doing anything on the machine but transcribing audio, there's plenty of horsepower to spare, but if audio's being done in parallel with other tasks, it's *possible* one could run into access-speed problems. I'm using external FireWire or eSATA drives.

pax / Ctein