system crash when recording in Audacity 2.01 - debian 7.1

[steve]

Are you using oss4 by any chance?

[john_difool]

No, I'm using ALSA

[steve]

Try opening Audacity without the H2 connected and do some editing. Do you still get the crash?

[john_difool]

I tried editing a big recording (3 hours long) without the H2 connected, I cut, used some effects etc, I had no crash, it just freezed a couple of times, but it came back and I guess it's normal with a big file like that.

[john_difool]

Today I installed Ardour and I was able to record with my Zoom H2 without crash. I start jack which I configured for my Zoom H2, then Ardour and it seems to be stable. I'd still prefer to use Audacity if there is a possible solution, I find it a lot easier to use, but in the meantime I have a solution.

[john_difool]

I decided to install the tango studio repository for debian and use Ardour. Thanks a lot. I'm not sure if the solved is correct ??

[steve]

I had no crash, it just freezed a couple of times, but it came back and I guess it's normal with a big file like that

When working with big files Audacity can sometimes appear to freeze. Processes that take a long time should display a progress bar, but there are some processes that can take a long time when working with big files. Generally I prefer to keep projects to under an hour or so. If I have a really long project I'll just split it into multiple projects of about an hour each, and that way I find that Audacity remains reasonably responsive and gets the job done quicker.

Some Nyquist scripts / plug-ins can cause Audacity to crash if used on very long files. One limitation of how Audacity uses Nyquist is that Nyquist often needs to load the entire audio file into RAM. If there is not enough physical RAM available then Nyquist is likely to crash, and if Nyquist crashes then it take Audacity with it. Nyquist effects are listed below the dividing line in the Effect, Generate and Analyze menus, and if they have an interface they have a "Debug" button.

[john_difool]

I finally found a solution to my problem in the linux MAO forum (http://www.linuxmao.org/tiki-view_forum ... forumId=27). I installed Tango Studio for Debian, which has everything I will ever need : http://tangostudio.tuxfamily.org/fr/doc ... ngo-debian; it works with alsa and jack, so I removed pulseaudio. Tango Studio uses MATE as desktop environment, so I removed xfce and also made some cleaning, erased a lot of unused soft, etc. Now audacity works perfectly, no crash anymore, I now have the choice between audacity and Ardour.

Thanks again for your help.

[steve]

Thanks for letting us know, and glad that you are now all up and running, though it's a shame that we don't know precisely what fixed the problem.
By the way, I've recently been trying MATE desktop (with Mint) and I like it