Audacity eating enormous amount of storage

I’m working with 5-track, 2.5 hour long files. Just people talking. I have a process I go through before I start editing (compress, normalize, high-pass, loudness normalization, limiter) and I’ve got it set up as a macro.

When I run the macro on one of these files (all five tracks), I need to make sure I have about 100GB of space on my hard disk or I run out of space before the macro finishes. Even when this doesn’t happen, the hard disk will be almost completely full. Then I close the file, and suddenly I get 100GB of space back again. But sometimes, it will run through the entire macro and fail to save the file (because not enough space), meaning the file becomes irretrievable and I have to start again.

Is this the way Audacity is meant to work? What on earth is taking all that space? Is there anything I can do to reduce the demands - short of doing all those steps above individually rather than as a macro?

5 mono tracks @ 44.1k @ 32 bit for 2.5 hours does end you up at about 8 GB. Each undo step gets fully saved too, so for your 5-step macro, you’d be at 40 GB at least. If your 5 tracks are all stereo tracks, you’d be in the ballpark of 80 GB instead.

The best thing for you to do would probably to edit non-destructively: You can create a template project which has a realtime compressor, high-pass and limiter already set up and import your tracks into that.

Alternatively, you can cut down on steps - the legacy compressor has an auto-makeup gain which normalizes the track already, so you’re saving yourself a step there. And of course restarting Audacity between the steps to clear the undo history is a thing you can do as well.

That template project sounds interesting - I don’t suppose you could point me to some info on how to set that up?