Trying to edit 2gb wav file. My laptop system drive has 30gb of free space. It runs out of free space trying to edit it. How is this even possible? I tried changing the temporary file directory to an external drive but it’s still consuming my entire hard drive and putting up an error message.
What’s going on with this? This has never been an issue before.
Audacity doesn’t get along well with external drives. It assumes any job, no matter how delicate or critical, can be done on any drive it can see. You could not, for example, do a difficult overdubbing job using an on-line drive several time zones away. So it has to be the internal drive(s).
It’s also good to know that Audacity makes a separate copy of the whole show every time you make a change or do an edit. When you perform an Edit > UnDo, it doesn’t unscramble your last edit, it just plays back the last show it saved.
So that’s where your drivespace is going.
Any way to edit your show in segments? 2GB is what, six hours in mono, right? What kind of performance do you have that’s six hours long?
Koz
it’s a 50 minute voice recording in a .wav file. The edits I’m performing are a simple eq/compress/amplify/export macro. in what universe does it require 20x the original file size to do this?
The world of non-destructive editing: where copying a section duplicates the entire track it came from.
and the planet of Undo, (can delete some of the undo history to save space).
That odd sound you hear is us whizzing past each other.
A 50 min WAV (Microsoft) sound file in mono (one blue wave) comes in at 264.6MB.
Not 2GB. Even if you shot it in stereo (two blue waves—not recommended), it’s 529.2 MB.
So given a mono track, you should be able to get through a number of edits before your drive fills up.
I was about to recommend a process for this production, but on further consideration, I wonder if it would work (add Starbucks here).
Make a protection copy of the show on a separate drive (not in Audacity).
Edit your brains out until the drive fills up and the editing becomes sluggish or distorted. Save a Backup Project under a different name. Close Audacity which will clear out all the copies, safeties, and duplications. Open the Backup and keep editing. Now that the Starbucks has kicked in, I wonder if the machine will even make the Backup Project, given the drive is full.
I can’t help thinking that once you get to the full drive stage, that’s the end of the show, right? Unless you make a protection copy right at the beginning, you’re hosed (technical term).
Koz
Before you updated to Audacity 3.7?
Also your posting doesn’t tell us which computer you’re using. People have run into problems changing from Windows 10 to Windows 11.
Koz
Did you shoot the voice track in Audacity?
Koz
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