What changed is I was running 10.6 forever, then upgraded to El Capitan and upgraded to the latest Audacity. It’s just not working. It was working earlier that day and then just decided to stop behaving. Even rebooting didn’t help. I’ve read elsewhere that others have had issues running it on El Capitan.
I previously used an older version on 10.6 and used the program for years without any issues whatsoever.
I did that. I uploaded a 40 min .wav file. Took 33 seconds. Not great but usable.
Then I applied Compression. The first quarter went smooth but then it crawled to barely any perceptible movement in the status bar where it just seemed to stall out.
I’m resurrecting my podcast and Audacity is an essential tool for me. Unless anyone has any other recommendations, I’ll look into installing an older version of Audacity or backtracking to an earlier OS because it could be El Capitan that’s the problem (unfortunately, that’s the highest OS my machine will handle.)
What are you using for storage? Your internal HD or an external USB drive? How full is your internal HD? How much RAM do you have?
Open up Activity Monitor and look at Memory and Disk. Are a lot of disk swaps happening? What is your memory usage?
In my experience the slowness you describe can be due to disk read/writes (page swaps or just Audacity making a lot of disk accesses) when working with a large file. I’ve seen huge speed improvement moving from an external USB HD to an internal fusion drive, then to an internal SSD.
You can certainly try an earlier version. If you do, rename your current version of Audacity (for example, add “242” to the end of the name) so you can try both versions with the same file and editing operations. You can find earlier version of Audacity here.
What do you by “1 task”? Do you mean like: Apply the Amplify effect works, but then anything else is extremely slow,
or do you mean that it works fine for one project, but then the problem comes back when you start another project?
As you’ve probably figured out; we can’t reproduce the problem, and we’re trying to figure out exactly what is happening. We can’t see your machine so we only know what you tell us. At this point, I still don’t really have a clear picture.