Audacity Very slow - 2.06

I’m running a Windows 7 PC that’s got a couple years on it but is pretty beefy; 8GB RAM, 2,6GHZ i5 CPU, solid state hard drive (where I store all my AUPs and the Audacity application, and the OS) and versions 2.05 and 2.06 of Audacity have been so slow as to be almost unusable.

(This is from the ZIP file, not the installer)

Yes, my projects are often more than 1 hour, sometimes I have 4 tracks that are over 2 hours, but I’ve had that since Audacity 1.2x and never had this type of issue. But now, I do Fade in, wait literally 10-15 seconds, and then the effect takes place. Delete, silence, copy, cut…everything has a minimum 10 second lag

I have even gone into Task manager and set the priority of Audacity.exe *32 to “real time” and no improvement.

It shows audacity as only taking about 16MB of RAM so I don’t think it’s a memory issue. My CPU and RAM both have plenty of availability per Task Manager. When I do a task in audacity the CPU meter does pump up to about 75% but never spiking at 100, and the total RAM used in my system is only around 4GB

But this is making it so I can’t even edit anything… I’m hoping there is a fix? I can’t imagine more hardware is the answer for this…

(of note, the size of the project is directly related to the lag…I just did a 5 second project and response times were perfect…but I need to be able to work on large multi-track projects as I could in previous Audacity versions)

Make sure you have Audacity from http://audacityteam.org/download/windows. If Help > About Audacity… really says 2.06 (only one dot in the file name) then it isn’t official Audacity.

There is no fix yet, but the developers know it’s an issue on longer projects and it is noted in http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Release_Notes_2.0.6.

I am a little surprised it is so slow on an SSD (solid state drive). It is slow on HDD’s (magnetic drives).

Do you have an HDD in the machine? Is that slower again if you save and open a project there?

For some users, Edit > Preferences… > Quality and set Default Sample Format to 16-bit helps. It halves the quantity of data Audacity works with.


Gale

My apologies, I had a typo. It was 2.0.6 for the version.

And no, I do not have a magnetic HD in this system, just the SSD.

I’m moving to a new system now to test and see if it’s specific to this system.