v3.0.5 playback is distorted

Hello,

I first came across this when I was setting up a studio to record a musical instrument. I recorded a couple of audio tracks from line-in. Everything sounded good and I went to bed. I left it overnight (~10hrs+) and upon playing it back the following afternoon I got distorted noise vaguely following the ‘rhythm’ of the waveform.

After trying to reset preferences and tweak sample rates, I ended up saving the project, rendering WAV file and quitting the application. The WAV file played fine and the display looked as it should (i.e. not a load of random values). After reloading Audacity and the project, it played absolutely fine.

However, fast-forward 2 days to today and I reload the project and it is just noise again. Visually it’s the same, but it isn’t playing back as expected.

Other audio programs work fine, it’s just Audacity that can’t seem to playback reliably.

(PS: The ‘Help > Diagnostics > Gather support data…’ menu option opens a dialogue telling me the report will be saved at ‘/tmp/…’, but when I click ‘OK’ and it prompts me for a filename for the report it is completely ignored and the zipped report file is left in /tmp/ with it’s original, auto-generated name.)

The project is 44.1KHz @ 32-bit FP.

Update: Changing the bit depth does nothing.

Update 2: If I play the project at top speed using the play at speed control, randomly after a few goes round, it plays fine at the higher speed. But, if I change the speed back to 1.00x, stop and play again (the speed control doesn’t change the speed of subsequent loops) - noise.

Update 3: I can’t get it to work at all, now… Quitting Audacity and reloading the project file makes no difference… Maybe I need to reboot my machine after each recorded track? lol

Update 4: Results in Update2 are neither replicable nor consistent.

Update 5: Internally-generated waveforms (chirps and tones) exhibit the same issues. Maybe the issue is between Audacity and the Linux sound system? But recordings I have made are not distorted (AFAIK.) Again, renders are OK, but playing back the renders fails.

Update 6: I can’t enable my disabled plug-ins. I open the add-on manager, “Select All”, “Enable” and “OK”. When I go back to check, they’re still disabled. Enabling individual ones also has no effect. I will try a reinstall. :unamused:

Update 7: I am running a ‘flatpack’ version so I will remove that and try a proper install.

Many thanks.
Audacity_dbgrpt-2-20211025T143904.zip (14.5 KB)