Audacity 2.3.0 freezing

[steve]

If the device/cable is the problem, now come I am getting an input level?

Is the USB plug good and tight in the USB socket?

[aajax]

How would I get a good input level if it weren’t?

[kozikowski]

No idea why it worked

You got lucky. Everybody knows a digital service is either there or it's not. There is no partial connection or other distortion or damage.

But you can have a perfect digital connection that's not present all the time. That gives you things like a perfect transfer of five minutes of music...until the humidity goes up...on Thursday. You changed the USB cable, but did you change it to a shorter one? That's highly recommended as is changing the USB connection on the computer. A connection on the back is more likely to work than one on the front.

I have a Mini where some of the USB connections will not run a keyboard.

One USB Cable is 6' (2M). If you go over that, Bad Things can happen to the connection. The USB microphone people run into this. A microphone can come with a 9 foot cable, but the microphone doesn't always work with a cable that long.

There's a deep philosophy thing, too. You're going to give the cassette player to your son and grandson, right? No? You're probably really going to transfer all your tape and put the whole thing in the bin. That means you bought trash. Sometimes the player turns to trash a little too early.

Koz

[steve]

If the device/cable is the problem, now come I am getting an input level?

If the plug is a bit loose, or the cable slightly damaged on the inside, you may get USB working some of the time, but not all of the time, or the data could be "mostly" getting through, but sometimes dropping bits (which will corrupt the data). There could be a component in the devices that runs too hot and causes data corruption. There could be a "dry joint" on the circuit board in the device. There are many reasons why intermittent faults can happen with USB devices.

There have been a lot of intermittent problems reported when using "Super USB cassette capture" devices (the same device is badged with a variety of names, including: "Generic", "HooToo", "Lychee", "EZ-Cap" and others).

[aajax]

Everyone wants to blame the player or the connection, but I confirmed I was getting input to the computer. The software should have been able to record that even if it was noise, no? Oh, and I actually tried with two different devices, so I'm supposed to believe both were bad? I mean, sure, it's possible, but this thing has a 4-star customer rating from hundreds of customers on Amazon. And, I don't know, but if this is a common problem with USB, couldn't Audacity be made a little more fault tolerant?

[steve]

Perhaps you could test the device with other software.

couldn't Audacity be made a little more fault tolerant?

There has been some work in the last couple of versions of Audacity to try and make it more robust against faulty hardware, but that is a very difficult and complex task.