Crashing on Yosemite

[kozikowski]

complete pains in the patootie

That's the alternate plural form, yes.

Audacity wasn't able to talk to the audio device again

Maybe it was considered wasteful and the OS shut it down. The audio device no longer exists. If that happens again, see if Apple > Preferences > Audio can see it.

Koz

[kozikowski]

I was rooting around in the Activity Monitor and turned up the attached.
Koz

[cmac185]

Well, while I'm trying to get good recordings with 2.1.0 on Yosemite I've been getting some crashes that I wanted to mention.

Today recorded the first message, about 35 minutes. Saved the file and closed the window then opened up a "new" window and set the recording level indicator to "monitor", i.e. it was monitoring the input on line-in. Sitting that way for about 40 minutes went to record by clicking on the record button and CRASH. Had to reopen Audacity and the recording started and finished ok, about an hour long. Both recordings were good, Audio Buffer = 15.

In preparation for this recording I turned off WiFi, closed all but one very small program that wasn't doing anything. App nap is off and I rebooted. The only difference between today and last week when all went well is that last week I quit Audacity, Cmd+Q, and restarted it between recordings. This morning Audacity was left running and I only closed the first recording session and then started a new session. See the attached crash report.

I've also had crashes when saving a recording as well as when trying to append to an already long, 2 hrs+, recording which may be the same mechanism as the crash occurrence today. Let me know if you want those crash reports as well.

Cliff

[Gale Andrews]

Thanks, we'll see if we can reproduce the crash after monitoring in a new window.

I've also had crashes when saving a recording as well as when trying to append to an already long, 2 hrs+, recording which may be the same mechanism as the crash occurrence today. Let me know if you want those crash reports as well.

Feel free to post the reports, but be aware that we have never been able to reproduce the reported crashes when saving or exporting.

Do I take it you mean saving a project, as opposed to exporting?

Thanks,

Gale

[cmac185]

Do I take it you mean saving a project, as opposed to exporting?

Correct. Over the time I've been using Audacity on Yosemite this has happened probably a total of 5 or 6 times. It has always recovered the data just fine, but it is a bit scary to experience when it is the only copy that exists.

Just to mention also regarding the crash when starting the recording - that has happened several times in the past even when using 2.0.6 on Yosemite so these crashes are not just one time things, but do happen occasionally. If you look way back to January 14 in this thread one of the conditions occurring then was crashing when starting the second recording.

[cmac185]

Well, here we are again. Another crash, but this time at the end of the second recording, before saving. I clicked on the "Fit Project" button. The program then apparently hung (color wheel spinning) for probably 6-7 seconds then the crash. I had a crash like this a long time ago, but this is the first on 2.1.0. BTW, the recording was recovered and sounded fine.

I don't know why these crashes take place, but with all the video flashing that takes place when performing some operations like saving a project I wonder if sometimes things just get out of sync and cause the crash, especially since it hasn't been possible to reproduce the crashes at will. All that flashing has to be putting quite a load on the video system it seems to me.

Crash log attached.

[cmac185]

We have another crash this week. This time when saving the recording. This occured after the second recording and happened when I entered the keystrokes Cmd-S to save the file. It immediately crashed, not after a pause as happened last week. ALSO - The recovery lost about 1/2 hr of data and not just at the end, but spaced out over the entire recording. The quality of recording was good, but has missing segments. I have had other crashes with Audacity, but the recovery has always been good. I'm really puzzled that this one wasn't. The program said it was a successful recovery. I suppose it is possible that the recording was dropping segments, but I've never seen that happen before. Once it started dropping data the rest of the recording has always been messed up.

The recording setup was pretty much identical to last week though I had allowed app-nap to be on this week and no reboot before starting the first recording. Since the timing is so similar to last week I doubt if the changes I made are the cause, though I would be open to suggestions how they could be.

Computer had been running several days without restarting, Audacity was started fresh before the first recording and the first recording saved then the window was closed, cmd-w, and a new window opened ready to start the second recording when the time came, about 45 minutes later. Display was asleep just before recording started and just before the recording was stopped.

Any hope of a fix here?

Crash report is attached.

Cliff

[Gale Andrews]

We have another crash this week. This time when saving the recording. This occured after the second recording and happened when I entered the keystrokes Cmd-S to save the file. It immediately crashed, not after a pause as happened last week.

Thanks for attaching the report. The report shows exactly the same as always (OSSpinLockLock). I logged the problem recently in this bug report: http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=987.

No, no chance of a fix I'm afraid because it doesn't happen for us on Mac Minis. Perhaps we would need to buy a portable Mac to reproduce it, I don't know.

If you have not tried already, making the second recording into the same project window might reduce the crash incidence.

ALSO - The recovery lost about 1/2 hr of data and not just at the end, but spaced out over the entire recording. The quality of recording was good, but has missing segments. I have had other crashes with Audacity, but the recovery has always been good. I'm really puzzled that this one wasn't. The program said it was a successful recovery. I suppose it is possible that the recording was dropping segments, but I've never seen that happen before. Once it started dropping data the rest of the recording has always been messed up.

How long are the missing segments? Are they always about six seconds or 12 seconds long?

If there's ever a problem with recovery, please attach the log from Help > Show Log... and the AUTOSAVE file from ~/Library/Application Support/audacity/AutoSave/.

If the Log shows no errors like missing block files and the dropouts are not of equal length then you could have recording dropouts.

It is possible I suppose that some AU files became damaged in the crash and that Audacity can't read them correctly, but that would be unusual. It's all supposition without the files to look at.

Display was asleep just before recording started and just before the recording was stopped.

Have you ever tried turning off display sleep?


Gale

[cyrano]

EDIT: Please ignore. I see you're already on Mac OS X 10.10.3. Didn't remember page 2 of this thread.

10.10.4 will be out soon and will (finally) have a network fix included. The problem was that Yosemite often reported a working network as unavailable. Only DNS failed and the conclusion was you had no internet.

Unfortunately, this error also affected some other processes. I've never seen it affect audio (certainly not Apple's internal audio), but there's always a first.

Now I come to think of it...

Could it be I never see this kind of error, because all the audio people I support occasionally have their system set to never sleep?

[cmac185]

Hi Gale,

I had wondered about recording in the same window. Could try that. Restarting Audacity between recordings also seems to keep it from crashing as far as I can recall.

Checking the bad file in parallel with the file recorded on the other machine all seemed fine until about 10 minutes into an hour long recording. Then the lost data/dropouts start to happen. Though I haven't gone through the whole recording I checked 6 different bad spots and 2 were very close to 12 seconds, 3 were very close to 6 seconds and one about 3 seconds. It's hard to be exact, but it suspiciously looks to me like the recovery failed, but without the files you mentioned it seems it is only a guess. I'm recording with the buffer set to 15 ms so may raise it to 20 and see how that works even though with the buffer at 15 every recording has been good so far until now.

I have not tried turning off display sleep. Another option I suppose though it seems like a long shot, but hey, can't hurt to try.

Regarding no fix, it sure seems strange that the Mac Minis never have the problem. I suppose it could be because of different sound cards though I would think the crashing has nothing to do with that, but more with display issues.

Cliff