New 1.3 Audacity -- you might get to "raise skinny elephants ... "

[dibl]

I observed a phenomenon the other day after using the new version of Audacity for recording a series of record albums. The phenomenon was -- my root filesystem ran out of space and my Gutsy system locked, hard, as in no mousy, no terminal, no nuthin'.

I was doing my usual manic multitasking, while running these albums across the turntable and capturing the sides, and there were a couple of cases of aborted recording sessions for various reasons. I am not aware of violating any of the rules of nice behavior while using Audacity, but after doing the Alt-SysRq RSEIUB routine, and getting the system back to semi-functional, my investigation revealed that the /tmp/.audacity file was at 2.6GB in size! That was a match to my former free space in the "/" filesystem, so I knew that was the problem. I nuked that file and restarted the system and all was fine, but I thought other Audacity users deserve fair warning.

[Snowhog]

Re: New 1.3 Audacity -- you might get to "raise skinny elephants ... "

...but I thought other Audacity users deserve fair warning.

And take all the fun out of wondering what happened?

[dibl]

Re: New 1.3 Audacity -- you might get to "raise skinny elephants ... "



Right!

However, there is at least one guy on this forum who makes his living using Audacity -- this little "added feature" could cost him $$$.

[eriefisher]

Re: New 1.3 Audacity -- you might get to "raise skinny elephants ... "

Is there no way to specify where to send the recording? I remember this issue with DVDrip. It would complain about not having enough space so I would just select/create another file in /home for it to use. Maybe you can do something similar with Audacity.

eriefisher

[dibl]

Re: New 1.3 Audacity -- you might get to "raise skinny elephants ... "

Is there no way to specify where to send the recording?

Good question -- it's worth a look. I never experienced this issue while using the prior version of Audacity.

By observation, it appears that the recording is "built" in temporary space under /tmp while the file is being captured. Of course, once the file is finished being created during the capture process, and you've done whatever processing you wish at that time, then you save it to a data directory, and close it in Audacity. So the consumption of temporary space should only be occurring during the process of capturing the recording. But apparently it can accumulate quite a large size, at least in this new version.

[Bongo5HH]

Re: New 1.3 Audacity -- you might get to "raise skinny elephants ... "

1.2.6 had the option of assigning your temp folder anywhere you wanted.

I have noticed excesive space used on my system - and have been wondering about it.. but since my drive is mostly empty.. it hasn't caused a problem yet.

GREAT pick up! Thanks for letting us know... if this happened during a Thursday night mix-down session I'd likely just start to cry. lol the show I work on gets delivered to the station Friday mornings... Thursdays are often plenty busy enough without running into this. I'm going to check it out when I get home.

Kev

[dibl]

Re: New 1.3 Audacity -- you might get to "raise skinny elephants ... "

UPDATE: Yes, you can still change the audacity_tmp file location in this new 1.3 version, so I have done that -- no more root filesystems lockups (at least not from Audacity!).

Gutsy 64-bit -rt kernel is still broken for sound, but -generic works fine.

[Bongo5HH]

Re: New 1.3 Audacity -- you might get to "raise skinny elephants ... "

The generic kernel has been working fine for me too.