Audacity HANGS in XP after 1 successful export session

[Cody]

I have really been struggling with this. The USB Turntable that we bought came with Audacity 1.x ... It had bugs causing all kinds of grief so I downloaded and installed 1.36 ....

Once again, I successfully record & export a set of MP3 files, I close AUDACITY (trying to clean it up), relaunch it, and at some point in my new recording, it just HANGS -- totally nonresponsive (TASK MGR, etc).... I have to press/hold the POWER BUTTON on my computer to get the system back up. I've Uninstalled & Reinstalled Audacity to no avail.

What's up with this??? Otherwise it COULD be a great product. I like the editing features over PYRO 5.x

[Cody]

ReallY? Nobody else experiences these system hangs??? Any suggestions on how to isolate this issue?

[jan.kolar]

This is not clear to me:
First you do several recordings, probably also recordings with playback, yes ?, and nothing bad happens.
Then you close (all) windows of audacity, you open the project again a start recording and after some time whole computer crashes? How long time it gets?
Did you do anything inbetween? perhaps you forgot to close some player and it interferes with audacity?
Or are the first records with playback, and it crashes as soon as playback is involved.

(Do you import your MP3 back?) (What if you record with playback without that export-reopen actions?)

I heard a lot of problems with USB turntables. Like registering as playback(=out) devices even if they are not at all.

System hang is a terible thing.
I have also often kind of system hang, but becase of HP printer (USB), not because of Audacity.
Fortunately it is a laptop, and reacts on closing lid -- after hibernation I restore previous state and all data.
Different trick is to recover mouse by pulling it out of PS2 and using USB mouse instead (perhaps external keyboard would work, too.)

[steve]

"System hangs" using Audacity in WinXP are quite rare. When they do occur, it is usually caused by an incompatible plug-in.

I'm unsure which version of Audacity you are using as Audacity 1.3.6 has not yet been released.

[Cody]

Sorry - meant to say the latest BETA -- which of course is 1.3.5

So to add more to the symptoms: I only have 1 USB device plugged in - the techniqa turntable (costco). I boot the machine up. Start up AUDACITY 1.3.5. Do a recording session and export the Tracks as multiple MP3 files ... all works fine at that point - all files intact. I then delete the previous 2 tracks (1 has the music, 2nd has the individual track names I inserted), start a new Recording ... it will start recording just fine and at some random point HANG -- the sound will be "stuck/stuttering" and the progress indicator will be stopped at that point. The minute I mouse click on ANYTHING (Task Mgr, Audacity, anything), the entire system is hung up requiring a Power/Reset to get it back ... 9 times out of 10, after a reboot, I will just restart the recording (deleting the previous incomplete project when prompted) and once again, the 1st attempt will be fine; 2nd one will hang like previous...

very very strange ... if there's anything I can provide you engineers (logs, whatever) please ask and I will be more than happy to assist where I can.

[waxcylinder]

R=The first thing I would try is exiting Audio after your first project record/edit/export - and then fire up a fresh instance of Audacity for the second project.

WC

[steve]

Also, it may be worth trying to eliminate the possibility of it being anything to do with the USB device (they are well known on the forum for causing all manner of peculiar problems).
Try running Audacity without the USB turntable connected to your computer, and record something through your sound card. It doesn't matter what you record, or what the quality is like, we just want to know if the hang problem occurs in the absence of the USB device. (If the USB device hangs, then XP will also hang- I had that problem with a USB modem).

[Cody]

OK ... did some more testing of this thing ... here's what happened:

1. Uninstalled AUDACITY 1.3.5 (via System Control Panel)
2. Deleted the Audacity directory (which was left behind after the uninstall)
3. Rebooted system
4. reinstalled AUDACITY 1.3.5 (it remembered my previous settings ... maybe I should have also run a CCLEANER for the Registry hold-overs?)
5. Launched AUDACITY & made a successful recording/export of a full album (about 10 mp3 files).
6. Exit & Restarted AUDACITY ... recorded another album just fine. And yet another one.

It was working just fine to 2 days -- I recorded (USB) a total of 4 albums using the EXIT & RESTART each time.

Then yesterday, after booting up my XP system, I recorded 1 side of an album, exported the files, exited & restarted AUDACITY - and bam, 16 minutes into the recording, AUDACITY was 'stuck' .... clicked on AUDACITY to exit it, and system totally hung.

[steve]

maybe I should have also run a CCLEANER for the Registry hold-overs?

No need for that as Audacity 1.3.x does no use the registry. However it does use a configuration file, which by default is:
Documents and Settings<user name>Application DataAudacityaudacity.cfg

In fact the quickest way to do a reset of Audacity back to day one, is to just delete this audacity.cfg file. It will be recreated with the default values the next time Audacity is run.

The more this topic goes on, the more I am inclined to think that it is a stability problem with the USB. The fact that it will sometimes run perfectly for several days makes it difficult to prove, but perhaps you could try testing Audacity thoroughly with the USB disconnected.

The alternative to using the USB connection, is to use the analogue output from the turntable, through a phono pre-amp, into the "Line In" of your sound card. While this is not quite so convenient, the results are very good and it has solved similar problems for quite a few people on this forum. (If you have an amplifier with a phono input, you can use that, alternatively you can buy small phono pre-amps from about £20 GBP / $40 US).

[Cody]

OK - wanted to give you an update on this issue. I *think* I have it narrowed down to when this is happening. I've stopped all extraneous software that had been running (e.g., Norton AntiVirus, etc...) and disabled (via network settings) my machine from the Network (since I had antivirus turned off). I leave ITUNES up because after saving my MP3 files, I import them into ITUNES ... Anyway, I've had a lot of successful recordings with this approach over around 3 days. Then yesterday, I needed my other networked-computer to Print via the computer I run Audacity on. So I re-enabled my Network, printed, and left the computers networked. (I had PAUSED the recording during my printing.) After the print job completed, I turned off the Printer and Resumed my recording via Audacity. 5 mins into the recording, everything hung up again requiring a Power reset.

So, not sure why this occurred, but it seems when I have Network (local & internet) activity enabled, I had this problem creep back up. After rebooting, I disabled my network again and have had around 5 more albums successfully recorded. Some day soon, I'll try this experiment again -- just enabling the network to see if I'm seeing the problem again.

Just an FYI .....