Bugzilla – Bug 2400
Mac: Zoomed in, playback meters slow to respond.
Last modified: 2020-05-10 11:45:38 UTC
Bill wrote in a Quality email thread on 2.4.0 RC testing RC03 >The playback meters seem slow to respond. It’s very disconcerting. >In 2.3.3 the meters react quickly to the peaks, but in 2.4.0 they don’t. > >iMac 5K retina 27” 2019, 3 GHz core i5,16GB RAM, fusion drive. Cliff and I do not observe this on our Macs - I tested with a normal song audio and with a Rhythm track with well-spaced clicks
*** STEPS UPDATED *** Title updated too, as it is probably all macs.
I've also observed that the lagginess correlates with the zoom level. With less than 15 minutes showing on the time line the meters behave normally. Zoomed in beyond that the meters are slow.
I generate a test click track Tempo 30 Beats per bar 1 This gives me a click every two seconds. I undock the Playback meter and stretch it to full screen width and float it over the click track. At all zoom levels that I use I observe no lag - as soon as the cursor gets to the click, the meter bounces.
I have tried my steps again, and various variations to refine the steps, and am wondering if I imagined the poor refresh. It wasn't the lag so much as what seemed like few frames per second - unsmooth movement. Trying again I'm asking for 30fps and I don't think it is 30fps, but it is acceptable/normal- i.e I'm not seeing the bug now. Bill can you clarify... 1) How long is your actual audio. 2) How long is the section that is on screen. 3) How long is the selection Is this from a default settings (other than a long meter) or do you have other things different such as a pinned play head?
We are receiving a number of reports of slow performance when using Audacity full screen on retina displays: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=94064
(Copied from one of the email threads) Here’s the wxWidgets bug for this slowness: https://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/18516 The Instruments profile shown is the same thing we get with Audacity. In his report, he thinks the problem is related to 24-bit and 32-bit conversions since his display only supports 24-bit and wxWidgets forces the bitmaps to 32-bit. I’m not so sure that’s it though as I’ve tried changing wxWidgets to use 24-bit bitmaps and it didn’t seem to make a difference (I most certainly could have done it incorrectly though!). The gimp folks complaint is here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/4130 And the Inkspace one is here: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/-/issues/1577 Other folks have complained as well. You can google “Mojave CGContextDrawImage” to see some of the complaints. Some folks think it’s the updates to Layers, some think it’s the color depth (like above), some think it’s the color space, bit I’ve yet to find a REAL solution that is within my abilities to resolve.
Workaround provided by: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/commit/4b1d5c3
(In reply to Steve Daulton from comment #5) We are receiving a number of reports of slow performance when using Audacity full screen on retina displays: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=94064 I note from that thread that the original report was back in December 2016 on Audacity 2.1.2 and we apparently did nothing about it (presumably because none of us could reproduce this on our Macs at the time. It took us until 2.4.0 RC03 to actually pick up on this through testing ...
(In reply to Leland Lucius from comment #7) Tested on macOS 10.15.4 on my MacBook Pro with Audacity 2.4.0 4b1d5c3 This continues to work fine on my Mac. Tested with a click tack with a 2 second gap between clicks zoomed in to show ~6 seconds on screen - with a 3 minute click track, no drift at the end - full synchronicity of screen drawing cursor, meters and sound.
Tested by Bill, and RESOLVED-FIXED (with Rc06). Also confirmed timings much improved on James' mac-mini.
