I’m using Audacity for the first time really in a school environment and having real issues with the amount of files that are being created by the program. When the project is made and saved the data is placed in to folders usually called e00 and d00 folders. However it is making a huge amount of files. For a 7MB sound file it is making up to 75MB of files. The users on the network only have a storage limit of 200MB so you can imagine the issues i’m having. Does anybody have any ideas how i can reduce this.
That 7MB sound file is probably in a “compressed” format such as MP3 or WMA. In order to perform audio processing on the audio, the data must be decoded first to an uncompressed format. Audacity does that by decoding to “32-bit float PCM” format, which is double the size of a “normal” WAV file (which is 16-bit PCM), but has significant advantages over 16-bit.
It is possible (but not recommended) to force Audacity to save its data as 16-bit, which will roughly halve the size of projects, but there may be noticeable deterioration in sound quality. To do this, go to “Edit > Preferences > Quality” and set the “default sample format” to 16-bit.
Note also that projects increase in size as you work on a project due to “undo” data. The “undo” data is deleted when the project is closed, or may be cleared manually via the “History” window (see: History - Undo and Redo - Audacity Manual)