1.2.5 not starting on Leopard, complains on wrong arch

[Shmoolie]

I upgraded to Leopard because my isp guy (who's also a Mac programmer) told me to. He never mentioned a problem with PPC's in particular, and he knows the hardware I'm running.I'll ask him if he has any insight into this situation.

As for the ranting…you gotta right…I love Audacity…thanks!

[kozikowski]

Excellent. We'll blame him.

Koz

[Shmoolie]

Don't blame my ISP guy! I figured out what the problem is – but WHY is still a mystery.

Audacity 1.2.5 runs on my PPC mini (10.4.11) and on my titanium PowerBook (Leopard) ++but only if Audacity is located on my external Fire Wire HD++ Go figure. It makes no sense to me. When I install that exact same download of Audacity onto either machine's internal HD, it won't run. Leopard gives the "architecture" error message, and Tiger gives no explanation. Leopard also places a slash thru the Audacity icon - Tiger does not.

I know of no reason for this, and I've not seen this phenomenon with any other application. If anything (rarely) an app needs to be on the boot drive. I've never heard of an app that needed to NOT be on the boot drive. FWIW: there is no system folder on my external drive.

[Finster]

FWIW, I'm also seeing this on m Intel MacBook Pro. Yes, I have downloaded the correct, Intel version of 1.2.5.

Oddly enough, I was able to use 1.2.5 on Leopard with no problems several months ago. I suspect that an update to Leopard may have broken Audacity's compatibility? Maybe the 10.5.2 update?

[Gale Andrews]

I believe the errors

"'You cannot open the application "Audacity.app" because it is not supported on this system"

are permissions errors. Unless you are on Network Home, there should not be any problem at all if you can use Audacity 1.3.5 (needs OS X 10.4 or later). Otherwise here is one possible way to fix it:

1) Open the Terminal.app from an administrator account
2) Update the permissions of the Audacity executable:

chmod 755 "<path to audacity.app folder>/Contents/MacOS/Audacity"

The <path to audacity.app folder> should be replaced with the full or relative path to where you placed the Audacity.app folder. For instance, if you placed the entire Audacity 1.2.5 folder into the Applications folder, you would use:

chmod 755 "/Applications/Audacity 1.2.5/Audacity.app/Contents/MacOS/Audacity"

Also running managed accounts (e.g with parental controls) and not installing Audacity properly can cause permissions problems. In particular, launching Audacity from inside the dmg you got it in can cause this error. This is the best way to install it:

1. Inside your Applications folder, create a folder called "Audacity"
2. Double-click the downloaded .dmg to mount it
3. Option-drag the whole of the .dmg contents (not the .dmg itself) into the "Audacity" folder you created
4. Double-click Audacity.app inside the Applications folder to launch it

Note I am not on a Mac but I've seen similar reports quite a lot.

[kozikowski]

I'm not on Leopard anywhere (except one machine at work) so I'm not going to be any first-level help. However...

There is a tool in Applications > Utilities > Disk Utilities called "Repair Permissions."

I wonder if that would be of any help. I don't strictly know what it does, but I know it finds damage any time a third party application is installed.

Koz

[Shmoolie]

I think I figured this out. I had formatted my internal HD as case-sensitive, when I installed Leopard. Turns out, there are a small number of apps that wont run if they are stored on a case-sensitive file system. I think Illustrator may be one. The workaround for these, is to install them on a case-INsensitive volume. That's what I unintentionally did, by running Audacity from my backup drive, which happens to be case-insensitive.

I'm now running Audacity from my boot drive in Leopard. It's a new external drive that I formatted as case-insensitive.

[Gale Andrews]

I think I figured this out. I had formatted my internal HD as case-sensitive, when I installed Leopard. Turns out, there are a small number of apps that wont run if they are stored on a case-sensitive file system. I think Illustrator may be one. The workaround for these, is to install them on a case-INsensitive volume. That's what I unintentionally did, by running Audacity from my backup drive, which happens to be case-insensitive. I'm now running Audacity from my boot drive in Leopard. It's a new external drive that I formatted as case-insensitive.

Thanks, I did not know that gave the same error as the permissions problem. There is indeed a problem launching 1.2.5 on case-sensitive systems (but not 1.3.5 or 1.2.6 (the a1 version offered on our site). The problem is when launching Audacity.app, it looks for an actual executable named Audacity, but does not find it because the internal executable has been named audacity (small A) instead.

There is a quite simple workround without using a different drive. Control-click "Audacity.app" in the folder where you keep Audacity and select "Show Package Contents"; then navigate to the "MacOS" folder and rename "audacity" to "Audacity".

Gale

[weeks]

We had the same problem. The fix turned out to be that the Mac operating system was set to "case sensitive". Within the
Audacity.app/Contents/MacOS directory is the file "audacity", changing that to "Audacity" caused the Audacity application to function.

[kozikowski]

<<<The fix turned out to be that the Mac operating system was set to "case sensitive". >>>

How did you know that, and how would you fix it, other than changing the filenames?

In UNIX, audacity and Audacity will coexist in the same folder because they are two different files. You can create very serious damage by changing that assumption.

Koz