Triple Boot Mac...Yo!

[kozikowski]

I got my Intel Mac working with native boot to Tiger 10.4.11 and two FireWire boots to Leopard 10.5.5. The Tiger drive has Audacity 1.2.5 and 1.3.5. One Leopard partition has Audacity 1.3.6 and the other 1.3.7.

If I launch a fresh Audacity and open the simple piano trill, only 1.2.5 presents the timeline ready to spacebar play. All the 1.3.x versions make me Do Something to highlight or select the timeline or the work surface and then the spacebar starts working.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

Thanks Koz. So do you want to keep this as a thread for all the woes of 1.3.7 (which version is mostly what we're interested in from development point of view)?

To begin with, here's another slant on "spacebar not working" and I suspect it's part of the same Mac and Linux problem, but we' ll see. This is on PCLinuxOS using wxGTK 2.8.9 and GTK 2.12.2.

Steps to reproduce:

After recording or opening audio, select an audio track and amplify its contents. Upon returning to the editing window, keyboard shortcuts will no longer work (space bar won't play, home won't go to the beginning, etc.). However, after pressing Play or one of the other navigation controls, the keyboard shortcuts will work again. This behavior seems to be triggered by other effects besides amplify as well.


Gale

[kozikowski]

I didn't catch this until late. I'll do it on the next Work > Home cycle.

Koz

[kozikowski]

Intel Mac, OS-X 10.5.5. Audacity 1.3.7a
20081212

Isn't this fun?

The behavior of the tools in 1.3.7 is insane, and I think I know why. The code has a race condition struggling to, or not to, yellow halo activate the timeline. Depending on the humidity, I get different conditions and different tool actions.

Launch Audacity.

File > Open> piano2.wav.

Timeline opens with the piano recital on it unhighlighted, no yellow halo, and no spacebar. APPLE-A selects the whole timeline (still no yellow halo or spacebar). Effect > Amplifier > Amplify +1dB succeeds.

And then it gets good. The yellow timeline halo flashes on once during the action of the Amplify filter and then goes out....and then it sometimes comes back.

If the yellow halo comes back, the tools start working normally and everything is cool. If the yellow halo doesn't come back, many of the tools like spacebar-play fail until you manually activate (halo) the timeline with the mouse.

I had a ball of yarn in the beginning where I would open up and close multiple instances of Audacity and get different conditions as they opened. Then I concentrated on one initial instance and found that it had insane behavior all by itself--just a little harder to spot.

I had one test where I had a second instance of Audacity whose yellow halo worked and appeared exactly the opposite of the first. I was thinking really hard about how I was going to write all this down, and realized I couldn't; I was trying to document insanity.

Rough to do under the best of conditions.

Enjoy.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

OK, thanks Koz. I'm not sure if you had multiple instances of Audacity though, because a lock should prevent this. If you launch Audacity when it's already running, you should just get a new project window within the same process (just like if you did File > New). That's what happens on Windows - there is only ever one Audacity process running.

Next mystery item for you:
http://n2.nabble.com/Noise-Removal-and- ... 59002.html

Very occasionally, users like the above on Mac report that they simply can't use Noise Removal because it never captures the Noise Profile. This user says that, and that this has been true on different Macs using different architectures. What do you make of this? Obviously "most" Mac users can use Noise Removal or we would know about it. And can you check in 1.3.7, is it true that there is no default button when you launch Noise Removal for the first time, so that pressing ENTER does nothing?

Thanks

Gale

[kozikowski]

<<<you should just get a new project window >>>

Yes. That's what I got. It appears like a fresh Audacity.

The point is the first and second work windows do not act the same--sometimes.

Working on the next problem.

Koz

[kozikowski]

I have no troubles using Noise Removal on both 1.3.6 or 1.3.7. Can the user be enticed to work with us on the forum? I do have a couple of ideas.

When I capture a profile, what files get added to my machine and where are they?

Koz

[kozikowski]

How about a little side trip?

http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 797#p30137

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

I have no troubles using Noise Removal on both 1.3.6 or 1.3.7. Can the user be enticed to work with us on the forum? When I capture a profile, what files get added to my machine and where are they?

I've asked the user if he can drop by. When you capture the profile, it should be captured in memory and retained for the session only. The exception is when you run Clean Speech mode (Interface tab of Preferences). Then the profile should exist as noisegate.nrp in an "NRP" folder at ~/Library/Application Support/audacity (and should remain while the Audacity preference is set to Clean Speech.


Gale

[Gale Andrews]

When you capture the profile, it should be captured in memory and retained for the session only. The exception is when you run Clean Speech mode (Interface tab of Preferences). Then the profile should exist as noisegate.nrp in an "NRP" folder at ~/Library/Application Support/audacity (and should remain while the Audacity preference is set to Clean Speech.

Koz, could you check one other thing about noise removal for us when you can? In Release Cheklist we have this bug:

√ (Mac only) Crash on restart (or possibly when first grabbing noise profile) when noisegate.nrp is present (having been written and saved in Clean Speech mode). MJS fixed this and fix works on Windows and Linux but has never been tested on Mac.

Could you enable Clean Speech in 1.3.6 release or 1.3.7 Nightly Build (on the Interface tab of Preferences at the bottom), take a noise profile, exit, restart and make sure Audacity already indicates it has the noise profile (OK button active). Then we could clear this bug.

Thanks

Gale