Audacity Forum

It is almost certainly something in my code, and has nothing to do with bitrate and filenames.
I haven't been able to reproduce it, though, and it is strange that it is intermittent.
I would like to provide an executable which can give me debugging information.
I'm not sure the best way to go about this, especially on windows. Any advice?

mdubin wrote:Sorry I was not clear. I always rip CDs using the same software which I have been using for years.

What software is that?

mdubin wrote: The process I use to create the input files for the Audacity Sliding Time Scale is a bit cumbersome and would require a lengthy explanation. Needless to say, this arose out of the fact that if I applied the sliding time scale to the original ripped tracks as is, an audible annoying "click" would many times be present at the very end of the processed file after export. So I erform a roundabout proceedure of combining the tracks and then splitting them again differently so in the end I would avoid the clicks. It was this roundabout proceedure (after ripping) which I did a bit differently yesterday and the file names themselves were generated automatically and did not have any spaces in them. For example, instead of "Part 1.Wav" which I named myself, the splitting program generated a file named "Joined-01.Wav".

What is the splitting program?

And was the Part 1.wav you submitted split or joined by that program? And when you apply Time Scale to Part 1.wav, is that the first time you apply Time Scale to that audio (irrespective of what file that audio is in at the moment)?

And is the exact time near the end of the file when it crashes always the same? What time is that exactly?

In particular I didn't think Time Scale should be often producing clicks at the end if applied to an entire Audacity track, only if applied to selections in a track. This makes me wonder (whatever the Time Scale crash issue is) if there is a better workflow you could use. When you rip the CD, do you have the separate movements as separate CD tracks? And apart from the slow down, what is the desired result in terms of WAV files? One WAV per movement, or one WAV per work? If one WAV per work, CDex has a useful feature to rip one file from any length of time on the CD, including the whole length (all the tracks).


Gale

otey wrote:It is almost certainly something in my code, and has nothing to do with bitrate and filenames.
I haven't been able to reproduce it, though, and it is strange that it is intermittent.
I would like to provide an executable which can give me debugging information.
I'm not sure the best way to go about this, especially on windows. Any advice?

To cut a long story short, you need to make a debug build of Audacity for Windows and for best results include the .pdb symbol files too.

Then mdubin has to install Visual Studio C++ Express and the Windows SDK as per http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Devel ... rosoft_SDK and run Audacity debug from inside Visual Studio. I don't think there is any shortcut to this.


Gale

Gale Andrews wrote:

mdubin wrote:Sorry I was not clear. I always rip CDs using the same software which I have been using for years.

What software is that?

FreeRip3 Pro (paid version)

Gale Andrews wrote:

mdubin wrote: The process I use to create the input files for the Audacity Sliding Time Scale is a bit cumbersome and would require a lengthy explanation. Needless to say, this arose out of the fact that if I applied the sliding time scale to the original ripped tracks as is, an audible annoying "click" would many times be present at the very end of the processed file after export. So I erform a roundabout proceedure of combining the tracks and then splitting them again differently so in the end I would avoid the clicks. It was this roundabout proceedure (after ripping) which I did a bit differently yesterday and the file names themselves were generated automatically and did not have any spaces in them. For example, instead of "Part 1.Wav" which I named myself, the splitting program generated a file named "Joined-01.Wav".

What is the splitting program?

I joined the ripped WAV files together using Visual MP3 splitter/Joiner (which works with both mp3 and wav without altering the sound quality at all).

Gale Andrews wrote:And was the Part 1.wav you submitted split or joined by that program? And when you apply Time Scale to Part 1.wav, is that the first time you apply Time Scale to that audio (irrespective of what file that audio is in at the moment)?

I used Audacity to split the joined wav file a bit differently. Since I was only editing, I set quality to 16 bit and dither to none. Yes, Time Scale was only applied once to that audio after doing the splitting and naming the file Part 1.wav.

Gale Andrews wrote:And is the exact time near the end of the file when it crashes always the same? What time is that exactly?

It always crashes at the very end when the remaining time is at zero.

Gale Andrews wrote:In particular I didn't think Time Scale should be often producing clicks at the end if applied to an entire Audacity track, only if applied to selections in a track. This makes me wonder (whatever the Time Scale crash issue is) if there is a better workflow you could use. When you rip the CD, do you have the separate movements as separate CD tracks? And apart from the slow down, what is the desired result in terms of WAV files? One WAV per movement, or one WAV per work? If one WAV per work, CDex has a useful feature to rip one file from any length of time on the CD, including the whole length (all the tracks).

When I rip from CDs, each track on the CD is a separate WAV file. In other words, if the CD contains 14 tracks, then 14 WAV files are created.

EDIT: There are times when I would want to apply sliding time scale to part of a piece only. For example, the scherzo section of Beethoven's 9th symphony is too fast in my Hogwood recording while the trio section is perfectly fine. So in this case I would split the WAV file into four: scherzo - trio - scherzo - coda. I then would apply the sliding time scale to the two scherzo sections only and then join all four together. I have never joined files in Audacity because it appears a bit complex. In Visual MP3 Splitter/Joiner, I simply load in all the files and click on Join.

Gale Andrews wrote:And is the exact time near the end of the file when it crashes always the same? What time is that exactly?

The one time that it crashed for me, the crash occurred exactly as the processing completed and before the waveform was redrawn. I get the impression that it's the same for mdubin. Perhaps he can confirm this.

(The one time that it crashed for me was on Windows XP SP3, with the file provided by mdubin).

steve wrote:

Gale Andrews wrote:And is the exact time near the end of the file when it crashes always the same? What time is that exactly?

The one time that it crashed for me, the crash occurred exactly as the processing completed and before the waveform was redrawn. I get the impression that it's the same for mdubin. Perhaps he can confirm this.

Steve: I did. please refer to my previous post where I responded to all the questions. Thank you.
(The one time that it crashed for me was on Windows XP SP3, with the file provided by mdubin).

steve wrote:

mdubin wrote:Needless to say, this arose out of the fact that if I applied the sliding time scale to the original ripped tracks as is, an audible annoying "click" would many times be present at the very end of the processed file after export. So I perform a roundabout proceedure of combining the tracks and then splitting them again differently so in the end I would avoid the clicks.

We probably need to know more about this.
There is obviously something a bit strange going on in the fact that you can easily reproduce the problem with sliding time scale/pitch shift and no-one else can reproduce the problem (though I did appear to reproduce the problem once after thrashing an under powered 10 year old computer all day).

Steve:

Although I am running windows xp pro sp3 (32 bit) on a 5 year old Dell computer, I do not think my computer is under powered. I am sure that the lengthy time it takes to process sliding time scale is normal for a WAV file containing almost twelve minutes of uncompressed music ripped from a CD. I have to believe that, despite being intermittent, the problem is something in 2.0.1 since sliding time scale/pitch shift never crashed in any prior version. I must have done this several dozen times in 2.0.0 and never had a problem.

mdubin

There have been changes to sliding time scale/pitch shift between 2.0.0 and 2.0.1 so it looks pretty certain that these changes are involved in the crash, but the fact that everyone else is having so much difficulty in reproducing the crash would indicate that there is more involved than just a "simple bug" in the effect.

So far we have managed to eliminate a number of red herrings, but two factors that are in common with the crashes that we have not yet eliminated are that the source files have come from your computer, and the operating system is Windows XP SP3. It may turn out that these too are red herrings, but so far we have not eliminated them and we have little else to go on. We need to find some way to catch the bug "in the act" so to speak, then otey has a chance to locate and fix the problem. The idea of giving you a "debug build" of Audacity is that the debug build can provide a trace of exactly what is happening before the crash and this can indicate where the problem lies - it's like an x-ray machine that allows the developer to look inside the program while it is running (the analogy that just came to mind is an "autopsy").

Yes, 1 minute processing time per minute of audio is about normal. My very old XP machine was taking a little longer than that.

steve wrote:...it's like an x-ray machine that allows the developer to look inside the program while it is running (the analogy that just came to mind is an "autopsy").

I prefer the X-ray to the autopsy. I'm still alive if I'm being X-rayed!

Steve:

I realize that it is not a simple bug. The fact that it crashed only once in my last 9 tries and that you and your team were only able to reproduce the crash once is perplexing.

I am very comfortable with windows xp. Maybe in a few years I will purchase a new box with windows 7 installed. Right now, my laptop at work has windows 7 64 bit and I am not that comfortable with it as I am with XP. I would hate to think that newer versions of software which are geared towards Windows 7 are causing possible conflicts with XP. There are many people out there who still use XP and were reluctant to upgrade to Vista. In fact, when I purchased my computer back in 2007 I had a choice of XP or Vista. Knowing that Vista was buggy, I wisely opted for XP. In fact, my company bypassed Vista and stuck with XP until recently.

I hate to have you and your team going to all this trouble just because I alone am experiencing intermittent crashes. No one else has replied to this post reporting a similar problem. So I think we should just forget about it. There is software available which does the same thing where I can alter the speed and/or pitch of WAV files without introducing distortion. Of course, it is not free but I will be looking into it.

Audacity is the best editing software I have ever used and is invaluable to me in cutting out the glitches inherent at the beginning and end of MP3 files converted to FLAC or WAV. Also I love that I can import FLAC files into Audacity and do precise editing and splitting on them as well. Visual MP3 Splitter/Joiner does not support FLAC and it does not provide the "cut" feature so important to me in Audacity.

Thanks for all your support.

mdubin