Audio Snippet Causes Audacity Program Lag

I recently was editing a recording of a book, when all of the sudden Audacity started to give me some super lag! I thought it was strange because up until that point it was pretty zippy. I went online to see if I could find anything, to help and came up short. I checked my computer specs to make sure I have plenty of RAM, and sure enough 15 GB available with only 20% CPU utilization. So the only thing that made sense was it was something on the recording itself causing a processing issue… and sure enough I narrowed it down to a 10 second snippet at the beginning.

Has anyone had an issue like this before. Any way to know what’s causing this problem? I just rerecorded the audio snippet and cut a paste everything else into a new project, and its all working peachy now. It would be nice to know how to locate and correct an issue like this in the future without so much effort…

I can share the snippet if anyone wants to check it out. I can’t upload here I guess because 20mb is over the size limit allowed. So I’ll have upload somewhere else or share from my personal drive or something…

We’ve received similar reports for Audacity 3.0.3 and earlier. Please ensure that you are using the current Audacity 3.0.4 (look in “Help menu > About Audacity”)
If you need to download the latest version, it’s available here: https://www.audacityteam.org/download/

Perhaps I am having a similar problem.
Any MP3 file I choose to play, in any position in the file, will start but quickly lag for approx 3 seconds, then play normally. I upgraded to 3.0.4 and I get the exact same behavior.