Locking Up, Not Crashing.

Lately I’ve been dealing with an issue that is making using Audacity almost impossible. Whenever I perform ANY action in Audacity it will go into a “not responding” mode. Whether I’m simply cutting a track, zooming out or applying an effect the program will basically stop and think for awhile. It will eventually come back and be usable again until I perform another action. I can even watch the memory and CPU usage jump a little when I perform the action but once it’s done the usage will drop back to normal and Audacity will lock up for several minutes. I’ve attached images of the task manager during and after a fairly high intensive effect (noise reduction) to illustrate the issue. But as I said this happens even with very low intensive actions. Let me know if there are any details about my particular machine you want to know that might help solve the issue. Thanks.
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Clear the Recycle Bin.

Chrome seems to be running a lot of processes. What happens if you hard shut down the machine (Shift-Shutdown), wait a bit and Start. Do Not Let anything else start. Do not run Chrome.

Does Audacity still have odd waits and gaps?

If it does, or the waits and gaps are different, disconnect the network and shut down the virus protection system.

Koz

Are you trying to use DropBox or Google Drive as one of your Audacity drives? What happens if you don’t do that?

Koz

Hmmm… I’m not using Dropbox or Google Drive with Audacity but if one of them is indexing that folder that might explain some of it. I’ll try running without chrome as well and come back with an answer.

I did a hard shutdown and didn’t run chrome. It seemed to help. Though, I was working on a smaller audio file. I’ll try again with a larger one and see if it’s still working better. Thanks for the tips though. Looks like it might be time to upgrade my RAM.

I can’t offer any solutions I’m afraid jmeush, but I can tell you I’m seeing exactly the same issues.

I started with V2.0.2 on on my mid range desktop. Tried going to 2.1.3, no difference. Tried again on an 8 core i7 machine with 8GB ram and still painfully slow.

Here’s what I’'m doing. I have a recording about 20 mins long that I want to split into 5 or 6 tracks. I highlight the wanted section say 4 min long and ctrl-x. Audacity then stop responding for about 3 minutes. I create new project (instant) and paste the cut section. It does dead for another minute or so.
If I go back the the original project and just resize to fir the screen I expect to wait another couple of minute. It’s clearly unworkable right now.

I wonder the cause could be? At no time to a see Audacity using more than a few % of CPU and even less disk activity.

One possibility that has been reported by some users, is that some anti-virus / security products can interfere with Audacity by scanning all of the “AU” data files that Audacity produces. When processing a long track, Audacity can create thousands of AU data files, so not surprisingly, if they are being scanned, that can slow down Audacity to a crawl. The solution in this case is to configure the anti-virus / security program so that Audacity’s AU data files are white-listed (so they will not be scanned).

I found a solution for myself. The issue was that my project was stored on a NAS. When I moved it to the local SSD Audacity behaved perfectly. I had assumed that it would create temp files on the local drive to do its stuff but I conclude that is not the case.

So I believe I’ve isolated the issue. As previously mentioned, Chrome was playing a small role when I was running multiple tabs but the true culprit was in fact Windows Defender. I can’t really fault the program, it’s just doing it’s job and scanning every new file created on the system but this is also why Audacity was slowing to a crawl. The solution is to turn off “Real-time protection” in the settings of Defender. It only turns it off temporarily but that’s probably a good thing in case you were to forget to turn it back on when you were done editing. I’ve attached a screenshot that shows where the toggle is located. The only thing is that it’s a slight annoyance having to turn it off every time I want to edit but worth it considering how slow Audacity was running with it on. Thanks for the help everyone!
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