audacity is crashing constantly

[droo09]

Hi there, I have had no problems with audacity until recently. Every time I click on record, the program crashes, simple as that. I recently bought a new audio interface, which I have routed audacity through several times, but I switch back and forth between my laptop speakers and my studio speakers, so maybe some setting got out of wack and is causing audacity to crash. Help pleasee..

[kozikowski]

Deinstall the interface. Start Audacity over at First Birthday by dragging its preference file to the trash. On my machine it's /Users/koz/Library/Application Support/audacity/audacity.cfg

Restart the machine. Launch Audacity and put all your custom settings in again. Stereo, 16-bit, etc. etc.

Audacity is a really simple program and depends on the computer to be pretty simple, uncomplicated, and stable. Foreign drivers and System sound software packages mess with the basic machine and can cause all sorts of problems.

If you install the interface again and the machine throws up, deinstall Audacity (and the preference file) and try Audacity 1.3.

This is assuming you've been through Disk Utilities > Verify Disk. and you have at least 20% free space on your System Drive. Do you run MacJanitor or Periodic?

Koz

[droo09]

Hey Koz and thanks so much for the help. After going through the steps you told me audacity working once again. I am not familiar with macjanitor or periodic as I am relatively new to macs. Are these programs essential?

[kozikowski]

Mac OS-X looks like a fuzzy-warm® place to be, but underneath all that designer fur is the UNIX computer operating system. This is a good thing. Without that, Macs would be history by now instead of rapidly gaining market share.

One of the things UNIX does is write everything down. "It's 9PM and droo09 just restarted me." "It's 9:30PM and droo09 just connected a USB drive." "It's 10:00pm and droo09 just ate a greasy, cold cheeseburger. Ewwwwwwwww!"

Sooner or later, all those electronic Post-Its start to clog up the system.

If you leave your computer running and wide awake all the time, it will clean up after itself--usually at around 4:00AM. It collects all those notes, compresses them and piles them all into a shoe box in the garage.

It does all these tools periodically. If your computer goes to sleep when you do, then those jobs never get done.

You can download a free program called MacJanitor and you can tell it when you want it to clean up for you.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/10491

You don't need MacJanitor. You can do this with your own fingers, but there's no pictures to help out. So if you're up to it...

Open a terminal. Applications > Utilities > Terminal

It should open up with something like this...

Last login: Thu Dec 25 19:47:11 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
jimmy:~ koz$


Then you type the commands in. It will look like this


Last login: Thu Dec 25 19:47:11 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
jimmy:~ koz$ sudo periodic daily weekly monthly [return]

[return] means press the return or enter key.

Password:

After you put your password in, the computer may grind for up to an hour--especially if you have never done it before.

When the prompt comes back, APPLE-Q quit Terminal.

After that, you can do it once a week and it won't take nearly that long. You can also tell people that you know how to run programs on your Mac from the command line.

Koz