Audacity memory hog

Trebor · January 23, 2024, 2:33pm

Mixing & rendering a track can purge the hidden “smart-clip” memory-bloat …

Allow deletion of unused smart clip data

opened 10:38AM - 21 May 23 UTC

Enhancement Request Design / UX Clips medium feature

### Your idea Add a function to delete unused / hidden smart clip data from t…he selected clips in order to reduce the project file size. One way to achieve this is by disassociating the clips from the original clip data, and creating new clips that only contain the trimmed sections of the original clips. It will be equivalent to repeating the following process on each of the selected clips: 1. Move the clip to a new track 2. Perform "Mix and Render" on that track while preserving the clip label 3. Move the rendered clip back to its original position (and delete the new track) This will allow future compaction to clean up the stale data if no other clips are using it. ### Problem to be solved When editing a long original audio file, it is common to first select some usable clips by splitting and trimming the audio. However, currently there are no straightforward way to permanently trim the audio, so the project will keep storing the entire original file even if most of them are unnecessary. ### Prior art _No response_ ### Additional context @virgilON suggested a similar idea in #3963 and #4047, though for a different (and solved) issue.