Crashing on Yosemite

[Gale Andrews]

Well, this weekend's recording went with out any static so hopefully that is a done deal, BUT after the last recording, before I had saved the file, I clicked the button to display the whole recording on one page width and Audacity crashed. Thankfully upon restart it recovered the files and all was well as far as the recording went. Sure had a couple of moments of concern though. Moral - Save as first thing if possible.

I've attached the crash report. Used Jan 18 debug version so hopefully it will have some good info for you.

Cliff

Thanks, Cliff. To be clear, was this Audacity's "Fit Project" button, or the Mac's green window button which has seen changes in Yosemite?


Gale

[cmac185]

To be clear, was this Audacity's "Fit Project" button, or the Mac's green window button which has seen changes in Yosemite?

"Fit Project" button. Both recordings were about 50 minutes long and the window for the first recording had been closed and a new one opened for the second recording. Didn't mention it in my last post, but I had set the "sound activated recording" feature with the sound level really low so as soon as the mute on the lapel mic was turned off there was enough noise to start the recording. It stopped the same way when the mute was turned on. I then clicked the "stop" button in Audacity then hit the "Fit Project" button. I don't remember for sure, but I think I used the same sequence on the first recording although I may have saved first.

I find it interesting that some of the crashes several weeks ago were when starting the second recording. It's almost as if after doing a recording sometimes something is left in an unstable state so when doing another one without doing anything else in between the possibility of a crash is greatly enhanced. Just a wild guess, for what it's worth. The strange part is that I've been unable to reproduce it after hours of trying.

Happy sleuthing.

Cliff

[Leland]

To be clear, was this Audacity's "Fit Project" button, or the Mac's green window button which has seen changes in Yosemite?

The strange part is that I've been unable to reproduce it after hours of trying.

Happy sleuthing.

Cliff

I haven't been able to either. One of the first things I noticed in the crash report was this:

Code: Select all

Time Awake Since Boot: 170000 seconds
Time Since Wake:       11000 seconds

I don't really believe it has anything to do with it, but I just thought the perfectly round numbers were really strange.

Leland

[cmac185]

I agree it looks strange. Checked all the Audacity crash reports and they are all round numbers. Even two other programs that crashed had round numbers. What I found even more interesting is the numbers and the differences between boot time and awake time.

Working backwards by date:

170000 - 11000 = 159000
79000 - 16000 = 63000
63000 - 36000 = 27000
62000 - 35000 = 27000
44000 - 18000 = 26000
40000 - 13000 = 27000

Like you said I doubt if this really means anything, but is a very unusual pattern especially in 4 of them.

Cliff

[Gale Andrews]

two other programs that crashed had round numbers.

Which other apps crashed and did they crash when you had just started to work in a second window?

Gale

[cmac185]

The other two programs were Google Earth and FireFox Plugin Container. Neither of them had multiple windows. It doesn't seem as if other programs write logs like Audacity does. For instance, FireFox crashes fairly often, but doesn't write any thing to the Diagnostic Reports directory. I was surprised to find the crash report for the Plugin Container. Those two reports, Google Earth and FireFox Plugin Container are the only other crash reports in that directory except for some hidden crash report files for mdworker and LCCDaemon all dated October 2014.

Cliff

[kozikowski]

FireFox crashes fairly often,

Reinforcing my decision not to upgrade right away.

Starting somewhere around Mavericks, the decision was made to make the OS much MUCH more energy efficient. The cheerfully spinning backup clock with the tiny clock hands actually moving backwards (nice graphics touch, that) turned into a still image with two arrowheads.

I remember reading that the OS actually shut down briefly instead of "wastefully spinning its wheels" on NO-OPs.

Anybody experience those hyper efficient cars that actually turn off the engine at stoplights and what a joy those things were to drive? 10.9 was practically non-functional when it came out and the first few upgrades had to do with patches so timing-critical applications would start working again.

Any of this sound vaguely familiar?

What is the effect when Audacity is forced to use a network-connected drive instead of a local drive? Any of the same symptoms?

Koz

[cmac185]

What is the effect when Audacity is forced to use a network-connected drive instead of a local drive? Any of the same symptoms?

Not sure what you are asking here. Run Audacity from a remote drive? Use a remote drive to store data? I have a backup drive 5400 rpm drive on firewire. Could run off of that. It is really slow in comparison to what I normally use.

FWIW, I'm using a really quick SDD internal drive. Boots totally (everything up and running, no HD action any more) from start chime to finish including typing in my login password in 1 minute. Maybe that contributes to timing issues? Just this evening I upgraded memory to 8GB from 4GB so maybe that could help or maybe hinder?

Interesting thought about timing.

Cliff

[kozikowski]

Doesn't count. FireWire is high-speed bi-directional. My last Mac Mini didn't boot from the internal drive. It booted from the large, external FireWire drive and it did that until the drive failed to come up one day. It did video, audio, television, Audacity and other live production work just fine.

I'm talking about the Audacity System Drive living on the network instead of local. Or Audacity working over here, but its capture drive is over there. Audacity doesn't understand network negotiation, collisions and delays and I wonder about the similarity between those errors and the general Yosemite "magic" errors.

Something like: If Yosemite is left alone long enough, it tries to go to sleep and flushes the first Audacity wake-up event down the loo. So the variable has nothing to do with length of show, number of tracks, excessive sample rate or any of the other normal causes of problems.

The developers call these "moon phase errors."

Koz

[Leland]

The developers call these "moon phase errors."

Koz

And they are complete pains in the patootie!!!

Along the lines about sleeping and such...I "think" I saw an audio device problem today while trying to get it to crash that was related to wakeup. But I couldn't reproduce it. Basically, Audacity wasn't able to talk to the audio device again...restarting Audacity was the cure. (All mostly supposition since I wasn't able to recreate and diagnose.)

Leland