ACX-Check Plugin causes Audacity to freeze

[Gale Andrews]

next time, if in doubt maybe my default thing should be to start a new topic

I'd say, only reply to the original topic if you're making a comment that helps the original poster.

If you want help with your own issue, always start a new topic. Replying to two users in the same topic can get very messy, and irritating for the original poster.

Thanks

Gale

[ericcartman]

thanks Cyrano, actually I have an SSD I'm fairly sure defragmentation doesn't apply to those. But nonetheless, it's about time that I cleared a few GB out of that hard drive.

Whatever gave you that idea?

SSD's can be a little different, depending on design of the controller, but they suffer from file fragmentation about as much as an ordinary harddisk.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT1375

[ericcartman]

next time, if in doubt maybe my default thing should be to start a new topic

I'd say, only reply to the original topic if you're making a comment that helps the original poster.

If you want help with your own issue, always start a new topic. Replying to two users in the same topic can get very messy, and irritating for the original poster.

Thanks

Gale

oh, that helps ! Thank you Gale. I'll note that down somewhere.

[ericcartman]

As a workaround, would it work to split the clip in two and analyse each section separately? If 2 15 minute sections pass ACX, I think it's unlikely that when joined back together, they will fail, right?

I think that workaround is all you have open to you.


It won't help to post the log. You've simply used all or most of your machine's RAM by using ACX-Check on a 30 minute track.


Gale

thank you. The workaround is easy enough, as long as 2 15-minute clips that "pass", won't give rise a 30 minute clip that doesn't, when they are joined together. I guess the only way to find out is to try it and then submit to ACX and see what happens. Their automated validation process seems to be instant.

[ericcartman]

SSD's can be a little different, depending on design of the controller, but they suffer from file fragmentation about as much as an ordinary harddisk.

Most evidence out there suggests fragmentation is much less of a problem than with HDD's, even though it exists.

I know we are talking about Mac here, but as a reference point, Windows will defragment SSD's once a month (which it call's "optimization") if you have Volume Shadow Copy (System Restore) enabled.

Windows does not let you manually defragment an SSD, as I understand it.

Gale

according to Apple documentation, OSX has automatic defragmentation/optimisation too, and it also can't be done manually, except using 3-rd party tools.

[steve]

Whatever gave you that idea?

I'd guess it's the thousands of articles on the Internet that say that defragmenting is not required (and not desirable) on SSDs, which is only partly true, but abundant nevertheless.

SSD's can be a little different, depending on design of the controller, but they suffer from file fragmentation about as much as an ordinary harddisk.

Rubbish, they don't "suffer" anywhere near as much. Yes SSDs do get fragmented, but unless the degree of fragmentation is extreme, the effect on performance for most applications is almost negligible (a notable example being Windows "Shadow Copy"). The reason that fragmentation can have such a big impact on spinning disk drives is that it can cause data to be widely scattered across the disks, so the (mechanical) read / write heads have to jump around all over the disk, which is much slower than sequential reads from contiguous data blocks. This is not the case for SSDs. Fragmentation does have an effect on SSDs due to the increased amount of metadata, the increased likelihood that data will need to be erased before write, and in extreme cases can cause data loss because there's a limit to the number of fragments that the drive can keep track of.

SSDs work very differently from spinning disk hard drives, and the old idea of "defragmentation" has been replaced by the idea of "disk optimization", in which reducing the number of file fragments is less important than the role played by "Trim". "Trim" tells the SSD which memory locations may be deleted, thus reducing the overhead of garbage collection. Modern operating systems should handle drive optimization automatically for SSDs, though I think that for third party drives on OS X it must be enabled manually (unless Apple have updated that recently).

SSD may benefit from occasional disk optimization, especially when old and if regularly writing very large files. By default, Windows will run its disk optimization on SSDs once a month if Windows System Restore is enabled. In most cases you can leave disk optimization of SSDs to the operating system.

[ericcartman]

SSDs work very differently from spinning disk hard drives, and the old idea of "defragmentation" has been replaced by the idea of "disk optimization", in which reducing the number of file fragments is less important than the role played by "Trim". "Trim" tells the SSD which memory locations may be deleted, thus reducing the overhead of garbage collection. Modern operating systems should handle drive optimization automatically for SSDs, though I think that for third party drives on OS X it must be enabled manually (unless Apple have updated that recently).

SSD may benefit from occasional disk optimization, especially when old and if regularly writing very large files. By default, Windows will run its disk optimization on SSDs once a month if Windows System Restore is enabled. In most cases you can leave disk optimization of SSDs to the operating system.

yes that was my impression. thank you.

[cyrano]

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT1375

That explains why you should no longer have to defragment manually. And that works very well, as long as your disk isn't completely full...

Besides, the article was written in OSX 10.3 days, so I doubt they had SSD's back then