Audacity.. Rightly Named

The past few nights, I have been to the point of pulling out what little hair I have. I downloaded this nice free BASIC language for the Mac, geared toward making games. It is very much like AMOS on the Amiga that I used quite heavily in the 90's when I was writing games for that platform.

Anyways, to get back in the groove of things, I decided to start with a simple game, KABOOM!. Things were going quite well, until I needed some sounds. So I download some sounds from the internet, and they worked, but were a little long, or needed other tweaks. Ok, so I thought to myself, I'll go find a nice free Mac sound editor. Enter Audacity. Downloaded, ran, tweaked some sounds. Everything seemed fine.

Seemed fine, that is, until I tried to open TNT basic. Error loading "Music Block". This was strange. Tried quite a few things, but to no avail. So, I thought to myself again. Ok, let's take a break, and go read a little NASCAR news. Open up the website, and the sounds not working in the little TrackPass preview window. Say what? Ok, this is starting to get strange.

To make this long story short, I tinkered around, just stopping starting things, rebooting, reinstalling QuickTime, etc. Sound started working again. Ok, I didn't thing much of it. Just a glitch, I thought. I went on my way coding some more. Then I needed another sound. Fired up Audacity. And then, sound quit working, and I couldn't load TNT Basic. Ok, I thought. Audacity must be doing something to the sound channels. Locking them up somehow. So, I did the whole tinker around thing again, and finally after several hours, got sound working again. This time, though I knew Audacity had to be the culprit. To prove my theory (I am a masochist I know) I fired Audacity up again. Sound quit working. I can't load TNT basic again. Off to do some googling. You may think I didn't do this by now, but I had. Hadn't turned anything up. This time though I turned my search around, and looked for "Audacity problem". Bingo, found this:

If no sound in QuickTime or Realplayer after using Audacity 1.2.3 - try checking Audio MIDI Setup (Applications/Utilities?). I find that Audacity consistently changes the Audio Output setting from 44100.0 Hz to 96000 - and changing it back brings back QT and RA sound.

Well, I gave that a try, and everything is right in the world once more. I am guessing that the Audacity team is working on resolving this. I would think it would an easy fix to not set the audio output to 96000, so I suspect this will be a new release before too long.