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

[Len Ovens]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2014, Alan McKay wrote:

> As I was reading I was curious as to my CPU power, so I opened a shell
> to run "lshw".  As soon as I hit "enter" my rip stopped in the usual
> fashion, but then everything on my desktop slowed right down.  My
> mouse was moving in slow-motion.  I tried typing this and it was
> missing letters (since rebooted).
>
> So it seems basically that my system is underpowered, I guess.  I have
> 4 cores, and this is from lshw.  Maybe I need a real sound card too?
>
>
>         description: CPU
>          product: AMD A8-5600K APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics
>          vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD]

My first thought at seeing this is: I wonder if this is one of those AMD 
products where the GPU steals CPU cycles to operate. I know one of the AMD 
lines of CPUs that includes the GPU has this problem. The GPU steals CPU 
cycles that the OS has no control over at all. This page:
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Latency-Test
Seems to think it is ok though. Do check all the things they disabled in 
BIOS.

For normal running of audacity at a reasonable latency it shouldn't 
matter. Audacity is not a multitracker (there are some people who have 
used it that way, but Ardour is so much easier for this) it's best use is 
just recording so a higher latency is better. (50ms plus) As others have 
said, mhWaveEdit is a better recorder and is the most similar to Audacity 
in feel.


--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net