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

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
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