09 Jan 2021, 12:53

Audacity waveform (audio track) not working

Using Audacity 2.3.3 on Pop!_OS 20.04, the waveform viewer has stopped working.

Playback and edits(*) are okay, but the waveform doesn’t get updated properly to reflect the edits, highlights, zoom in/out, or scrub audio, whether by mouse or keyboard.

I believe it started when I had to hard power-off my laptop when it froze.

Upon restarting after that power-cycle, Audacity offered to clean up orphaned files which it said were “small and unrelated to the current project” or something to that effect.

*edits = I can record audio and can (cut highlighted audio via scissors button)

To troubleshoot, I have

  1. uninstalled Audacity 2.3.3
  2. removed my data folder via rm -rf .audacity-data/
  3. reinstalled Audacity 2.3.3
  4. uninstalled Audacity 2.3.3
  5. sudo apt autoremove
  6. removed my data folder via rm -rf .audacity-data/
  7. installed Audacity [b]2.4.2[/b].

But the problem remains, for either version.

I installed each version as a .deb file flatpack from Pop!_OS Pop Shop. (I have not tried installing either of them as a flatpack via command line, which I might try after posting this.)

2021 jan 09 audacity 2.4.2 waveform extreme 2021 jan 09 audacity 2.4.2 waveform zoom in 2021 jan 09 audacity 2.3.3 waveform 2021 jan 09 audacity 2.4.2 waveform highlight 2021 jan 09 audacity 2.4.2 waveform zoom out

13:17 Saturday 09 January 2021 JST

Before posting, I checked https://manual.audacityteam.org/ to doublecheck the word “waveform” but it turns out they are called “audio tracks” in Audacity. https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/audio_tracks.html

Searching again, I found Audacity 2.3.3 track display area not updating on Linux which at the very bottom suggests if I remove ~/.xinputrc, that will solve it.

$ cat ~/.xinputrc 
# im-config(8) generated on Sat, 02 Jan 2021 12:47:27 +0900
run_im xim
# im-config signature: 3a4bfe2e919afd2d677c1c2f43f9a8aa  -
$ rm ~/.xinputrc

I uninstalled and reinstalled Audacity 2.4.2 and the audio track is diffrent but not fixed.

I also unset GTK_IM_MODULE which had the value xim before, but even after doing that, uninstall and reinstall Audacity flatpack does not show the audio track correctly.