Audacity pausing and slowing

2.4 Gighz P 4, 1.72 gig ram, Win XP.

Playing a file in audacity 2.0 and then opening Firefox or another program or doing something and Audacity pauses playback or slows.

Is this normal or operating system or audacity issue?

It’s still possible to overload a powerful computer. What are you doing in FireFox? How big is your Audacity show? If you watch a HiDef Stream in FireFox and try to play a 6-hour four-channel uncompressed sound show in Audacity, yes, you might run out of memory and something is going to suffer.

Real time is magic and both of them demand unquestioned loyalty from the memory stack. They can’t both win.

Getting more exotic for a second, those two may compete with the internet content server and key logger running in the background and your Norton AntiVirus fighting those and Windows Update trying to renovate the room while you’re hosting guests for tea.

It’s a festival inside a computer.

Koz

I didn’t have this problem in version 1.3. Audacity would take priority in the background regardless of other background or foreground tasks.

Then when I reinstalled XP on my computer, I installed V2.0 and it has had this slowing problem. I’m wondering if the thread execution or
task priority is different or changeable.

Audacity 2.0 is likely to be slower than 1.2 or early 1.3 with long or many tracks unless you have a very fast computer with a lot of memory (RAM).

If you want to play music while using Firefox it is better to use Windows Media Player which plays the files without importing them into itself as uncompressed data.

If you have turned on “Play and/or record using RAM” in Audacity’s Directories Preferences, turn it off.

If you believe raising Audacity’s priority might help, you could do so in Windows Task Manager. Generally Firefox uses a lot of resources. When I “only” had 2 GB RAM on Windows 7 I found it helped most other programs including Audacity for Firefox’s priority to be increased, rather than increasing other programs’ priority to compete with Firefox. You can make a batch file or a shortcut that has the command to run a program at higher priority then double-click the batch file or shortcut to launch the program:
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Program-Start-at-High-Priority-(Windows)
http://www.uberullu.com/2-ways-to-start-a-program-in-high-or-realtime-priority/ .



Gale