[LAU] [Bulk] Re: Audacity on Ubuntu 14.04 is REALLY unstable

[Philipp Überbacher]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2014 06:54:45 -0400
Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:

> OK here is more detail on what I do.
> 
> All I am doing is ripping some old LPs.   Very simple stuff.  Then
> splitting it up into MP3s
> 
> Whenever I am ripping if I am using a web browser at the same time,
> what happens is audacity stops recording as though someone had hit the
> "stop" button.  It does not hand or anything, and I can hit "record"
> again and it goes (but it still screws up my rip of course)
> 
> Then when I am done of that an processing, a really simple one.  I
> zoom into the area between songs then I want to play that short clip
> to see exactly where one song ends and the other begins, and maybe
> figure out whether there is a few seconds of silence I can cut out.
> So I hit "play" and then when I hit "stop" at the other end, it hangs
> solid and eventually gives me the option to kill or wait.  I kill it.
> That one can sometimes happen the very first thing into audacity
> before I've done any other editing.
> 
> As for settings - I think all defaults but I'll go through that later.
> 
> I am using regular Ubuntu not studio.
> 
> No massive files - just the length of an LP.  Usually 45 minutes but
> it can happen at the 2 minute mark.

My guess is that it has to do with the audio backend. I had problems
with another program that also uses portaudio. That one would not work
properly with ALSA but only with pulseaudio.

If this is with pulse, turn it off, use plain alsa, see whether this
still happens and vice versa.
You can also try jack. Audacity uses jack in a very weird way, as soon
as you roll audacity autoconnects to the first outputs it finds and
disconnects once you stop rolling, but if that is compatible with your
general setup than that's OK. The benefit of running jack in this case
would be that nothing else can access this soundcard and interfere.

Regards,
Philipp