On Sun, 17 Aug 2014 10:27:01 -0400 Alan McKay <alan.mckay(a)gmail.com> wrote: Not using Ubuntu, but debian testing, which is probably a pretty good match in this respect. If you're having problems with other apps as well it does look like a computer issue. Install memtest and give it a long run from boot up and see if you shows anything. -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

On Sun, 2014-08-17 at 10:27 -0400, Alan McKay wrote: Look out for BIOS updates, or what ever the BIOS is named nowadays (EFI, UEFI). Build latest stable vanilla kernel, use a real Linux distro instead of this evil spyware distro ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.html ). My mobo years ago needed a few BIOS and kernel upgrades. -- http://iknowwhereyourcatlives.com/

Nope, replacing the HD did not fix it. So what's next?

On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Will Godfrey <willgodfrey(a)musically.me.uk> wrote: OK I will - but why would I see it only with Audacity and nowhere else? -- "Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV" - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"

memtest ran overnight with no issues. 4 full passes. i'll send another email later today with more details that some are asking for ... getting myself underway right now

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

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 02:21:56PM +0200, Philipp Überbacher wrote: That's only one of the many apps that claim to support Jack but get it completely wrong. In many cases, but not always, portaudio is to blame. All that after ten years of Jack. IMHO it's time for some experiments in ballistics, using rotten tomatos. The wole point of using Jack is to allow the user to make arbitrary connections. Any way of 'supporting' Jack that does not allow this gets it wrong. Even if connecting to the first two physical outputs or something similar covers 99% of use cases. Because to do that you don't need Jack at all. If users want Jack it's because their requirements are in the remaining 1%. No doubt someone will reply 'just submit a patch'. That's easier said than done. In almost all cases I've investigated it's not just the 'audio interface' part of an app that needs changes, not even if that is well abstracted as it usually is. In many cases the logic that gets it wrong is hidden deeply inside the app, and fixing it will affect more or less everything, including the user interface. Any attempt to do that would require knowing the entire app inside out. Only the original authors can do that in reasonable time. Even if I were to submit a patch to e.g. Audacity, VLC or fldigi that would really fix the way those broken apps handle Jack, there is zero chance that it would be accepted, because it would be very invasive. Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)

James Stone &lt;jamesmstone(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: I guess it depends on what you want it to do. I used to use Audacity for normalising and splitting up large audio files (e.g. lecture recordings, digitised cassettes), but I switched to mhWaveEdit a couple of years ago for this and have been very happy with it. -- Adam Sampson &lt;ats(a)offog.org&gt; <http://offog.org/>

OK I installed the class desktop and am now ripping while I type this in my browser :-) Will let you know how it goes. If I can facebook for 5 minutes without a crash then we are good ... Thanks all!

OK, low-latency kernel is in ... we'll see how it goes. Now that we are messing with kernels I actually know what I am doing :-)

Interesting. So I was doing some googling to try to find out some technical details on what is involved in the low latency kernel , and I came across this to start with. http://askubuntu.com/questions/126664/why-to-choose-low-latency-kernel-over… 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] physical id: 35 bus info: cpu@0 version: AMD A8-5600K APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics slot: P0 size: 1400MHz capacity: 3600MHz width: 64 bits clock: 100MHz

Have you seen this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/audacity/+bug/355846 Seems quite similar to your problem. Have you set latency correction to 0? I think you may be better off making long recordings with time machine. J On 19 Aug 2014 03:08, "Alan McKay" &lt;alan.mckay(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Mon, 18 Aug 2014, Alan McKay wrote: 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

On Mon, 2014-08-18 at 21:32 -0400, Alan McKay wrote: So you didn't forget to add the user to the group "audio" ("realtime" or whatever it's called for Ubuntu Studio and you also set up PAM? -- http://iknowwhereyourcatlives.com/

After putting myself in the audio group I do the "lshw" test again while ripping and all seems fine.

On Tue, 2014-08-19 at 06:37 -0400, Alan McKay wrote: To /etc/security/limits.conf or /etc/security/limits.d/audio.conf add: @audio - rtprio 99 @audio - memlock unlimited some prefer to give less rtprio, perhaps you'll prefer @audio - rtprio 95 @audio - memlock unlimited IIRC on older machines graphics, mouse, keyboard could become unresponsive with prio set to 99. "nice" values are useless for rt. You should use the rtirq script too. OTOH, somebody already mentioned, that for using Audacity there's no need for a PREEMPT or PREEMPT RT kernel. http://www.rncbc.org/jack/ Be careful when using a rtirq package from official Ubuntu repositories, nobody seems to test if the script fits to the provided kernel, IOW sometimes the provided version doesn't work, simply run the script with the status option, then you'll see if it works and don't forget to set up the config for the script, OTOH the default likely will be ok for your setup. rtc0 should get the highest prio, followed by your sound device. -- "I Know Where Your Cat Lives visualizes public photos of cats on a world map using coordinates embedded in their metadata. [snip] "I Know Where Your Cat Lives" iknowwhereyourcatlives.com is a data experiment that visualizes a sample of 1 million public pics of cats on a world map, locating them by the latitude and longitude coordinates embedded in their metadata. The cats were accessed via publicly available APIs provided by popular photo sharing websites. The photos were then run through various clustering algorithms using a supercomputer at Florida State University in order to represent the enormity of the data source. [snip] " - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1910822604/i-know-where-your-cat-lives

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Len Ovens &lt;len(a)ovenwerks.net&gt; wrote: Yup, I am there. Added it yesterday audio.conf is there But now I'm back to the generic kernel. It seems just adding myself to the audio group was a massive help. -- "Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV" - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"

On Mon, 18 Aug 2014, Alan McKay wrote: Control problem. I have done that and not had a problem. Again this is a control problem - something bad happens in the control of the program. So that would be the new (still experimental IMO) unity desktop with it's ever changing interface that is slowly moving from X to MIR. You don't have to use studio, but have you tried xubuntu or kubuntu? Both of these desktops seem to have no problems with audacity. Studio, which I am using uses XFCE and kubunu, which my wife uses, is KDE. My wife uses audacity as her "DAW" :) so she has done lots of starts and stops with no problem. Also look for the next release of audacity in the next month or so. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net

On Mon, 18 Aug 2014, Alan McKay wrote: No, I am saying that Unity is messing things up. I have seen more problems with people trying to do audio work with unity that go away when unity goes away than I would care to share. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net

On Mon, 2014-08-18 at 10:18 -0400, Alan McKay wrote: Make a new install of Ubuntu Studio (advantage for you, Len is member of the developers team ;), Xubuntu or Kubuntu or any other *buntu. AFAIK non of them includes the Ubuntu spyware, so this seems to be a better way, than just installing Xfce4, KDE or other packages. Better than using another *buntu IMO is to use another distro with a WM instead of a DE. -- http://iknowwhereyourcatlives.com/