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

On Mon, 18 Aug 2014 22:08:24 -0400
Alan McKay <alan.mckay@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> 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-generic-or-realtime-ones
>
> 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@email-addr-hidden
> version: AMD A8-5600K APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics
> slot: P0
> size: 1400MHz
> capacity: 3600MHz
> width: 64 bits
> clock: 100MHz

A low-latency or RT-kernel is absolutely not necessary to use audacity,
and I think you system is far more powerful than mine (i3). For what
you're doing any sound card should be sufficient, so that shouldn't
be it either. When your whole system slows down something is very wrong.

I still think that it could be related to your audio setup. I'm not on
Ubuntu but Audacity 2.0.5 can misbehave for me too. For example with
some audio devices I could get audacity to roll and it completely hung
as soon as I pressed stop. It seems like it does not handle errors of
that kind well.

I guess you use audacity with Pulse Audio, but you could try it with
ALSA and also with ALSA while making sure that Pulse Audio is disabled.
Also make sure you have the correct playback and recording devices set.
You can do that stuff in the preferences. There is also a 'devices
toolbar' where you can do the same basic setup.

In the preferences you can also find a buffer setting which you could
increase (default=100ms), but even if that helps there still is a
problem with your setup.

Regards,
Philipp
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Received on Tue Aug 19 12:15:03 2014