I’m using Linux for music production for many years, and I consider myself very experienced with Linux in general at this point.
Nevertheless for the past few days I’ve been unable to run Audacity at all.
I didn’t know what is wrong, because running it in the terminal didn’t show anything useful:
$ audacity
(Audacity:5274): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_disable_setlocale() must be called before gtk_init()
(Audacity:5274): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
(Audacity:5274): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
Today I’ve run it with gdb to finally find out.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/bin/audacity
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libthread_db.so.1".
(Audacity:12711): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_disable_setlocale() must be called before gtk_init()
(Audacity:12711): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
(Audacity:12711): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
[Inferior 1 (process 12711) exited with code 0377]
This was surprisingly mysterious. Exit code 0377? This got me thinking…
It turned out it was painfully simple. Audacity exited because there was another instance already running on my system. How didn’t I know this?
I routinely suspend my system to RAM and resume it each day. I also use 6 virtual desktops for different activities and I had Audacity open on one of them, that I forgot about.
When I realized the source of the issue at first I thought that I shouldn’t not report this as a problem, as it was caused by my own stupidity - however I think there is a problem that should be addressed.
Audacity didn’t tell me this. Nothing would hint me that this is the reason why it doesn’t run. It was a pure incident that I have finally found out.
I would expect Audacity to at least spew something in the terminal like “Audacity is already running with PID XXXX. Exiting.”
That would have saved me quite some confusion.
A better solution would be for me to have Audacity quietly open a new project. This is what I wanted to do after all.
What do you think?