Audacity is unresponsive

[xgipper]

I am running Audacity 1.2.6 on OSX 10.4.11 on a G4 with a 400 mhz processor with 448 mb ram, with an external USB(1) Edirol UA5 soundcard, which I think falls within the requirements http://audacityteam.org/download/mac.

However I find Audacity to be frustratingly slow and often unresponsive when I ask it to do something; a typical example is that I press play, and it plays; I press stop and it stops; but then I can't get it to play again, or select some audio to work on. Even if I do manage the latter, many of the menus are just grayed out - eg save, delete, effects - even the 'about' menu. Eventually I close the window in frustration, and, fortunately, it asks if I want to save before quitting. I have to re-open the file to do make the next move, or quit and re-launch. At the moment I'm trying to work on a pretty simple file, with two stereo tracks with imported music and a mono track for a voiceover.

I'm just wondering if I'm maybe doing something wrong, have it somehow set up wrong, or if my machine isn't up to the job. I don't have these kinds of problems with Bias Peak LE - although I think that's limited to one stereo track in my version so maybe uses less processing power?.

Cheers for any pointers: I hope I've described the problem sufficiently.

[kozikowski]

There's no shortage of trouble with USB audio devices. What happens if you complete your capture and logging and disconnect the Edirol and restart the Mac? Do all the problems suddenly go away?

You might try downloading the 1.3.x version of Audacity. You can install both, but only run one at a time. Minimum System Requirements need to be viewed as something to stay far away from. It was written by the advertising and promotion department. That list is the answer to the question, "Will the machine run at all?" Well, yes. It does.

You could easily find that the machine has a hard time managing live audio management and the USB services at the same time.

1.4.x Audacity on the way.

Koz