Crash in WinXP

[Scienceman123]

The latest Audacity Unstable crashed under these conditions:
Export as MP3
Export as FLAC
Mix and Render

Other things not tested.

[kozikowski]

Audacity can become unstable on Windows machines if their hard drives are over 90% full and/or have not been defragmented.
Koz

[steve]

A quick note on that - "more than 90% full" at any time. While you audacity is open and you are working on a project, the temporary files can eat up a huge amount of space - if you have an hour long recording (close to 1 GB) and you choose Mix and Render, or Export, then the entire file is copied, eating up another gig of drive space. Working on large files it is quite common for the temporary files to exceed 20 GB.

@ koz - do Macs have this problem? On Linux, everything is fine up to 99.9%, but as soon as you hit 100% disk usage it is a horrible crash.

[jan.kolar]

Audacity can become unstable on Windows machines if their hard drives are over 90% full and/or have not been defragmented.
Koz

Why should it?
It might have very poor performance not suitable for recording/replaying, but it should not crash.

I am running it sometimes under severe conditions -- 256MB RAM shared by Audacity, IExplorer, mailer, and gcc compiler,
100MB disk space remaining (out of 10GB). This is when I would answer a question in the forum.
Yes, Audacity then fails their real-time task: as I expect, it looses seconds of sound while recording or makes crazy things while playing. And yes, if I go far too far, I go make tee because XP needs some minutes to answer last click.
But I never had a related crash. On the other hand, I have seen number of crashes right under blue sky.

Under win95/win98, an application can be denied memory or other resources any time, and then it is hard to keep it from crash, OK,
but under XP, my experience says you can do anything unless,
unless unless XP shows message like "enlarging swap space, application can be denied memory",
and at that point, it is good to stop from all actions for a while.

Might be that crashes are missattributed, that in reality come from Audacity's internal flaws?

[steve]

Why should it?
It might have very poor performance not suitable for recording/replaying, but it should not crash.

I would agree that it will rarely cause a full crash (Blue Screen of Death), but as you say, performance can drop to such a low level that the computer appears to be locked up. If at the same time Audacity is attempting to write to disk (Export as MP3, Export as FLAC, Mix and Render,...) then it could lock up for a very long time.

I am running it sometimes under severe conditions ... 100MB disk space remaining (out of 10GB).

What happens if you record 8 minutes of 44.1/16 stereo and then try to Export under those conditions?

[jan.kolar]

Steve, I am not crazy, I never did record without enough space.
But I will do for you (I will not explore the quality of record. Have no generator at hand.)
Now 8'30'' of recording, switching back to IE to write a report.
What happend? A wonder !

Unfortunately I have 1.5 G free right now. So I copied number of 104MB files, to start below 100MB free space.
When recording (1.3.5., winXP) there was once some swapping/or/disc activity and about 1 second display freez.
In past I would assume some audio would be lost ...
but:
Something worse happend to me in Vista (with plenty of memory and disk)
and I did not observe anything missing (yes, audacity has 5 seconds buffers, I think).
... I would fear, but I would expect audio is allright.

During first minute and two, free disk space slightly increased (increased, increased).
(I was watching not to miss time to delete a file. I never did during this recording and export!)
I got several Low Disk Space warnings from XP.
Much later, when I had about 70 MB free, it jumped up to about 150 MB.
I stopped the recoding at 10', with 107MB free and with 106 MB in Audacities temp.

Ok I will do export now (Very tight, is not it) ...
Again Low Disk Space message, about 70 MB (this seems to be my setting for it??)
I ended with export finished with 3700kB free. (Tight. Perhaps I received no large email, no windows or antivirus update, so no problem...)
Wav is 106MB (101 MB (106 070 060 bytes)).
I deleted first 104MB file (I do not want to crash with unsaved post to Forum... )
I saved the project.
Importing the wav (no-copy method)
deleting another 104MB file (205MB disk free now)
Inverting the imported audio
Mix and Render (deleting another 104MB file on the way)
. Simultaneously I copy the saved project to different partition.
. This is bad idea -- it might take 8 minutes to do this task at the same time. (Was 5' I guess.)
The resulting stereo track should be 10 minutes of zero signal.
What does Amplify say?
It suggest 50db (its maximum).
Doing it. (Low Disk space message 70MB free, deleteing 104MB)
What does Amplify say now?
30.8dB
And yes, when amplified and zoomed it looks like the usual dithering, which I forgot to switch off.
All was in the same drive C:, shared with XP, too.
In memory: IExplorer (one tab with the Forum), Thunderbird (including its "biff" -- not cooperating well with junk filter ofcourse), one notepad, two cygwin prompts, two [file]Explorers, Total Commander, Windows Pictuer and Fax Viewer, and Audacity.
Active: Audacity, Total Commander (just refreshing free space information), and between 8' and 10'' also IExporerer. Important that I did not touch the other applications.


So what is the conclusion for you and others?

The conclusion for me it is: Never do not copy/move files to other partition during recording. Timing would be very tight and some dropout is very likely. Ofcourse, infact do not copy files at all. etc. (I am not crazy.)


------------------
closing the project without save
opening
two orphaned files. (This I call a bug unless I am lazy. I am lazy now.)
not deleting them
clicking track. Should select whole track but it does not select last half seconds. (a bug ?)
Ooops I have active SnapTo. (anyway, this is a bug).
SnapTo off, select, Invert,
Import the wav file
Render and Mix (with dither off, but it is too late I think)
Amplify
Amplify
50+34.3 (is 3.5dB more quiet than before, and looks like dither, OK)
(However, 3.5dB seems wrong to me for a while... I would expect at most 3dB. Is there someghing wrong with dither? --- Moment, Amplify takes peaks for its suggestions, and noise peaks are random even over loooong samples, so this might be just that, OK OK)

[MDOC]

Audacity can become unstable on Windows machines if their hard drives are over 90% full and/or have not been defragmented.
Koz

If a swap file (virtual memory) is enabled on your system, then the above statement is inaccurate. The percentage stated depends on the HD space minus the size of the swap file.

[jan.kolar]

MDOC,
do you mean 90% should be replaced by 90,5 % or by 89,5 % ?

It is much more important what everything shares hard drive's hardware. This includes swap you mentioned. Furthermore:
Is there Windows directory (with registry etc.) ?
Is there other partition that could be in use during that time?
What every bit of your software is going to do during recording?
Worst of all is if other partitions get active, eg because they contain windows.

If I ever start some programs on my old laptop during processing, I have to avoid this killers:
Internet Explorer, Acrobat Reader, and (surprise!) Windows Explorer.
And File Open/ File Save dialogs are killers, too.
And (another surprise) I should not double click any file with unknown extension, or without extension.
Performance can go down to zero at the moment.
(During recording I should not start any new program, of course.)

For editing, just that should be important, that we do not hit 100% at all. (Including Undo history etc as well as activites of all software installed!!)

Anyway, at most 90% is the right recomendation, regadless it means 88% or 92%.
(Note: It is good to run defragmenter time to time and this one is unhappy if it has less then 15% free. In fact I'v never seen it doing really good job, but certainly it did help much anyway.)

I forgot to say: my experiment (where I was about 100MB free during loong recording and went to the last 3700kB while export) was done on NTFS.
(This was not important I think. More important was that I understood what is going to happen,
so that it never touched 100% for a single milisecond. And for the recording, that the fragmentation was not too bad.)

[MDOC]

MDOC,
do you mean 90% should be replaced by 90,5 % or by 89,5 % ?

I mean it's gonna be less than 90%. This percentage value depends on the relationship between HD size, swap file size, and available space on the HD. The more swap file you allocate, the less this percentage is. Contrari-wise, the more space availability you have, the more this percentage will be. Because space availability changes the more you manage the HD, this percentage is therefore dynamic. You cannot put it down to a fixed value.

The point: you don't know where this limit is before you get a crash. You only have a rough idea.

[jan.kolar]

The latest Audacity Unstable crashed under these conditions:
Export as MP3
Export as FLAC
Mix and Render

Other things not tested.

I tried your steps. I can not make it crash.

I think your crash could be connected to full hard drive(?) or memory (full or bad),
or problems with your OS (which one is it? And what version of audacity?) or your hardware
or to some other actions you did, nothing to do with steps you describe.

If you need help or want to help audacity, we need more details about your system and that the crash would appear repeatably.


------------------------------------------------------

It appears to be well known Audacity crashes with full HDD -- but it actually did not for _me_ with 1.3.5.
I tried what happens if using a full external harddrive (besides some loss of data, of course).
It gives a lot of related (and perhaps unrelated) messages but I could not produce a _crash_.
I noticed it produces 0B flac file without error messages (!) while
I got long list of Audacity's native error messages with 0B mp3 file (a little surprise for me since the encoder is an external program.)
Mix and Render gives errors, but does not crash.
Very fast check with Undo gave expected result, too.

If Audacity has not free disk space during the Mix and Render, but later there is space again,
it also shows "write error" messages, as expected.
If I use save as later, (some space on the disk now, at least for several .au files),
it says "Could not save project. <basename of filename> is not writable or disk is full", and
"Failed to copy <file.au> to <file.au> (error 112: there is not enough space on the disk)"
And it "frezes" with Progress bar having no bars and 28s ellapsed time (out of 7:13)
After 'cancel', the Progress dialog hangs there forever. (Some progress bar issues were fixed in currrent development tree, I do not know if this is one of them.)
Audacity's menu is accessible where from I can Save-as to other drive. (OK)
Then I save-as again back to original drive, where the space decreases and then it starts increasing(!) up to 40MB.
I get the two error messages. It did create directories but no data is in there (though a lot of space now).
Now I have enough space to save anything. Save-as. Saves OK.
Another Save-as. Saves OK. But surprisingly, the set of .au files is larger (115 out of 56 files; [I really mean 115, not 112]).
(The new files have older date. Ofcourse I choosed unused filename, so they are new copies of old blockfiles.)
(Though, .aup files are identical with exception of the single line with projname.)
Save as with not enough free space ... errors as above (OK)

Summary: not as healthy as it should be but no crash comming in my case.


Note that it is pointless to try Audacity with full windows partition since then anything crashes randomly including win itself.
[And with about 100MB (downto 4MB) free, Audacity was quite happy during my test because I never touched 100%full.]


On the way I observe: Name of a Saved-as project does not appear in Recent Files in other windows.
(When I close Audacity and start again, the name is there.)

Selection Start shows beautiful 000,-01 seconds.

I would expect zero signal displayed for lost blocks of sound, but it shows different things in different zooms,
infact even different at different times.