Audacity Forum

klikkolee wrote:may I ask what besides a fully-functional (in my experience) alsa driver is required?

Fully functional ALSA driver should be the only thing required, assuming that Audacity has been built correctly with all the necessary dependencies.

Does Jack Audio System work on this machine?

I use Jack regularly on this machine and have not encountered any issues.

That does remind me, however, that I use the linux-lowlatency kernal since I use jack the entire time the machine is on (except when trying your suggestions to fix audacity when I turn jack off). Can using the lowlatency kernel interfere with audacity?

Does Audacity launch when Jack is running? (have you tested both with and without Jack running?)

Yes, The tests I mentioned in my first post and most of the ones asked of me were tested both with jack enabled and with jack disabled.

This is very odd. If Jack is running then there 'must' be at least one device that Audacity can use (assuming that Audacity has been built with Jack support enabled).

Has Audacity ever worked on this machine?
How did you install Jack?
What repositories do you have enabled in sources.list?

steve wrote:This is very odd. If Jack is running then there 'must' be at least one device that Audacity can use (assuming that Audacity has been built with Jack support enabled).

Are other applications using JACK and/or you audio devices when you launch Audacity?


Gale

Gale Andrews wrote: Are other applications using JACK and/or you audio devices when you launch Audacity?

Normally, the only jack clients on the machine are a pulseaudio-jack bridge (part of my preferred jack controller, the Cadence suite),an alsa_out to allow output to the hdmi output in addition to the motherboard soundcard, and sometimes an instance of carla, a plugin host. I tried starting audacity with various combinations of these on and off to no effect

steve wrote: Has Audacity ever worked on this machine?

No

How did you install Jack?

the jackd package from ubuntu universe

What repositories do you have enabled in sources.list?

I have attached a zip archive with my sources.list and my sources.list.d

Rather a lot of different repositories there.
Where did your version of Audacity come from?

audacity is installed with the audacity package from ubuntu universe

Unless Gale, or anyone else, has more ideas, I think we've covered all of the easy options. We can see that Audacity is crashing early during its start-up process, but I can't see anything to indicate what is making it crash, and as far as I'm aware it is not a known problem, and is not reproducible on our computers. We also know that the affected computer has a mix of software from many repositories (including "unsupported" repositories). We also know that the hardware set-up is quite complex (having HDMI audio via the graphics card in addition to the sound card), so if the problem is hardware related, we are not going to be able to reproduce the problem.

At this point I think I need to ask: How important is it for you to get Audacity working on this machine?
In order to trouble shoot the issue further, I think we are going to need better debug information, but that will require running a "Debug build", and Ubuntu Xenial does not appear to have a debug build of Audacity.

The way that I would approach this problem (if it was on my machine) would be to build a debug version of Audacity from the source code. This 'could' in itself solve the problem, because Audacity would then be built against the libraries that are installed on the machine (libraries on your machine may be from other repositories, so there 'could' be compatibility problems with the libraries that Ubuntu used to build Audacity).

Building Audacity from the source code 'may' not be straightforward as you may have incompatible dependent libraries installed (which could be the cause of the problem).
IF Audacity (debug) builds OK, and the problem persists, then we would be able to get a "backtrace", which may at least give us a clue as to where/when the crash occurs.

Pursuing this further is going to take time and effort. We are happy to try and help, but it's up to you how much time/effort you think it's worth investing in this (with no guarantee of success). I understand if you decide it's not worth the effort

If you do want to continue, do you have any experience building applications from their source code?
There are step-by-step instructions for Ubuntu 14.04 here: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 19&t=88943
(Ubuntu 16.04 should be pretty much the same).