You get the SBBOD when the computer takes more time for a task than it’s expecting.
Tiger is a very old machine and 2GB of memory is not a lot of memory for editing entertainment – audio or video. Audacity tries to keep your show in memory for speed while you’re editing, but if you have a million things running in the background (pull up the Doc and see how many things have marks next to them), that’s not going to work. OS-X will try to spin off some of the work to hard drive and that could take hours – that will give you the spinning beach ball.
Close everything except Audacity and try again – or restart the Mac. Also, how long is your show? Three minutes? Two hours? Audacity will not edit a two-hour long show in that amount of memory.
Please look at Audacity > About Audacity and tell us all three digits in the Audacity version number. A 2.x version of Audacity should offer to recover the project after a crash so you wouldn’t lose it. If you don’t have the current 2.0.2, please get it here Audacity ® | Download for Mac OS .
If this still happens in 2.0.2, please tell us exactly what type of file you are opening (MP3, AIFF, 5.1 AC3)?
Most 1.3 Beta versions of Audacity allowed that, but only if the user turned on “Audio cache” in Directories Preferences.
Audacity 2.0.2 does not keep the audio data in memory at all - we made that experimental until we can fix the crashes that were reported with that feature. So in 2.0.2, all audio data is written to disk.
Merged two posts as they were identical apart from one sentence.
Gale and Koz:
Thanks for the replies…Here’s some additional infor that may help you to come up with an answer for me.
AUDACITY VERSION Im using: 1.3.14
My MAc OS is 10.4.8
I am editing MP3’s that are usually very short ( I do voice over work) so usually the audio is anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes before I
try to edit it.
-I usually only have firefox open along with audacity open when editing.
When I reboot machine,Audacity does ask me if I want to recover…if I try to do that, it says "cannot recover this file check directory for more info)
I will try your suggestions of downloaded updated version and changing preferences.
It probably asks you to check Help > Show Log… . Is it possible to capture that information and attach it as a text file or paste it in here? After opening Help > Show Log, you’ll probably have to drag a selection from the top to bottom of the window, then Command - C to copy it.
Can you also attach:
A short 10 second file that crashes Audacity after you start editing it
I have now downloaded the newest version 2.2 and after two days of using it, same problem.
Almost every other recording I am editing it is giving me a spinning wheel on my mac.
Doesn’t seem to matter is its 1 minute or ten seconds sometimes when I try to position the cursor on
on point of the audio where I want to make a cut…it freezes position,and 3 seconds later the spinning ball appears.
I have let it sit for 20 minutes to see if its working on something, but to no avail…just keeps spinning and I have to reboot mac.
I cannot attach the audio because once it goes into spinning motion,there’s nothing I can do with cursor.
Also, with this new version it will still not let me get the recording back when Audacity comes back…gives me the message you printed in your last email.
Something new,upon start up, I get a warning message that NOT ALL NYQUIST FUNCTIONS will operate.
I think you have some very serious system problems.
Close Audacity.
From the top of the desktop: Go > Utilities > Disk Utility.
It may look something like the attached picture. I have two hard drives, One called “JimmyHD2012” and one called “Jimmy SnowLeopard.” I assume you only have one like most Macs.
Select your main Hard Drive like I did in the picture and read the capacity numbers lower right. You see mine has 79GB capacity and I only used 6GB. What are your numbers?
If you have little or no space available, then that’s where your SBBOD is coming from. A machine with no space available can become dangerously unstable.
If you have 10% or 20% free space, then Verify Disk (Don’t Repair Disk). See if the tool finds any errors on your drive.
You should definitely do what Koz says, but if that doesn’t help I’m afraid you will have to try the suggestions I already gave.
You can attach the file that you import into Audacity when Audacity is closed (just locate it in Finder).
What message exactly is that - is it to look at the log? Then that is what we need. Please see Help > Show Log… and see if you can select and copy that text.
This suggests you have not installed Audacity correctly. Have you mounted the DMG and dragged the entire “Audacity” folder into your “Applications” folder, and are you then double-clicking Audacity from the Applications folder to launch it?
Capacity 111.5 GB
AVAILABLE 74.6 GB
used 36.9 GB
Number of files: 416,243
So it looks like I have plenty of disc space, I purposely don’t have much on this MAC so that I can use it solely for vocieover prod. and holding those files.
Thank you.
What was the result of the verify test?
Have you ever run the Activity Monitor while you’re trying to edit? It might be useful to know what’s overloading; disk activity, CPU activity, etc.
Another note. Do what Gale suggested with the preference files. Audacity doesn’t reinstall by reinstalling. It “reinstalls” by resetting its preference files to First Birthday.
I would request you comment at each step that you complete so we can keep up. We have to build and maintain your system in our heads to do this and the closer you follow the process the better.
I would definitely try Audacity > Quit Audacity then reset audacity.cfg as per http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/preferences.html#stored . The path to your Audacity temporary folder does not look like a normal default temporary directory to me.
