Audacity 3.2.0 Not responding

Good Afternoon,
I have been using Audacity for years and have had no problems until today. For some reason within the last 30 minutes, when I go to edit a file it stops responding. I have restarted my PC, uninstalled and re-installed Audacity and it is still freezing. Please help! :slight_smile: I’m using Windows 10.
Thank you so much!

~M

I might be in a similar position. I was having this issue on and off and now it’s every time that I add an audio file into Audacity to edit (doesn’t matter what type of file) everything is fine until I try to zoom in and WHAM it stops responding except spitting an option to save my project when I try and close it via right clicking on the taskbar. I can’t click on anything though and am forced to task manager close it.

Very annoying but happens without fail as soon as I attempt to zoom either by ctrl+mousewheel or the menu.

I’ve restarted, installed and uninstalled, tried different files… Nothing changes.

Same thing here. 3.2.0 is very much not a stable version. I have crashed twice after zooming and then pressing spacebar twice in rapid succession. Shame considering I’ve been using Audacity forever with no such issues til now. Also Win10 64bit.

I could reproduce the freeze when pressing spacebar too quickly and filed a bug for it: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/3699

I have not been able to reproduce any freezes on importing or zooming yet. Do you have some steps which always cause a freeze or crash for you?

Hi there,
Thanks for replying. Right now, Audacity is stuck on a file I have been trying to edit since yesterday and so it freezes whenever I hit ctrl-x to cut and it freezes when I press play.

I tried it again and here are the steps that I take before it freezes:
-Open Audacity

  • recovers last file that I was working on
  • I continue the last action (ctrl-x) it then freezes for a few minutes
  • I try the action or play the file and it freezes again
  • And then I use ctrl-alt-del to end task

Hope this helps.

UPDATE: I have resolved my issue. I discovered that the file I was trying to recover was corrupted. I deleted it and created a new project with no issue.

Add another log to the file. I’ve never had Audacity crash in years of use.

This one happened to me when I clumsily juggled between pause and play a few times. Should be easy to reproduce. Editing a podcast episode, decently large MP3 file. (Stereo, about 20 minutes.) Had made a number of edits, went to hit play again, hit pause instead, hit play, but it didn’t start, so I went to hit play again and managed to hit pause again (it’s late, don’t judge me). Hit play again…and that’s that. Still sitting there “not responding” after a solid 20 minutes or so.

Kinda basic QA move on any audio player I ever tested during my QA career: you do stuff like that, try to see if you can cause a memory leak or otherwise generally try to overwhelm it. Concerned this release didn’t get a solid QA review. No slight against the QA team, just saying my spidey sense (well honed after 25 years of doing QA) says this one has some pretty deep set instability. Lots of little stuff not working that should have been obvious catches. (Presets on effects? Not working at all. Just one example.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got about half an hour of editing to do over because Audacity’s rock solid nature had lulled me into bad habits and, why no, I hadn’t saved my work, thanks for asking.

More on that sluggishness I noted above.
I do content editing for a weekly one-hour pod which contains 3 hour-long 48kHz WAV files. When I first assemble the tracks into the project, Aud 3.2 is behaving fine, but I noticed it started slowing over time. Cuts & pastes that inintially took <1sec were taking upwards of 3-5sec, and even Ctrl+B to create a note would take about 5sec before I could start to type.
In order to get back to work, I exported each track as a WAV again and then re-imported them into a new project.

The old project (saved & closed properly) had grown to about 3.2GB on disk, while the new one is just under 2GB and is back to behaving like a snappy champ.

It almost seems as if the longer I work, the more the file bloats, and doesn’t purge at save/close. My only workaround at the moment is to perform this WAV export when it gets sluggish and build a new project every time.

I have confidence this will be addressed, but I did want to throw my datapoint into the mix for the devs. Thanks!

As you know, your project will always get bigger as Audacity saves all of the UNDO information. Just as you do, I periodically Save, Close, and re-Open my projects as I become confident about edits I have made. (A simple edit, such as amplify everything by .01) will double the size of your project).

Additionally, a new “Smartclip” feature introduced in Audacity 3.1 allows you to “resize” a clip simply by grabbing the top half of the edge of the clip and moving the ends. When a clip is made shorter, nothing is actually deleted, and you can later decide to move the clip boundary back.

It is possible, this “smartclip” feature may be causing your “bloat”. If you are trying to delete leading or trailing silence, for example, you may wish to grab the bottom half of the edge of the clip to select the area to trim, and then press the delete key.

Also note that 3.2.1 has been released and you may download it here: Audacity ® | Downloads