Hello! I’m looking to replace my aging Lenovo Think Pad. What are the min specs for a new pc to run Audacity well?.
And, are there specific machines that work especially well with Audacity?
Thanks!!
I answered a similar question here.
I don’t know where they’ve hidden the system requirements but any modern PC will be fine. It requires an operating system newer than Windows XP, a CPU that supports SSE2, and an NTFS (or newer) drive.
Computers have been powerful enough to record and play back stereo for decades. But every new version of Windows seems to run more junk in the background so you’re not always getting ahead. It’s the background stuff (or multitasking) that tends to slow things down. There is a FREE online book called Glitch Free about optimizing your computer for audio.
Most “processing” (effects, etc.) aren’t done in real-time so computer speed doesn’t affect the quality.
If you are doing high-resolution multi-track recording you may run into limitations but Audacity isn’t great at multitracking anyway (if you can get it to work at all).
I guess it’s technically not part of Audacity, but having a GPU and more cores will make the embedded OpenVINO AI stuff run faster.
Thanks! I’m considering using an older Mac (circa 2017) to just run Audacity and Source Connect. I replaced it with a new Mac because overall it just could not handle all the ops run every day. It would be “free” ofccourse 
I don’t really understand your last post…
I have an iMac Retina 5k 27" from 2015 running perfectly with Audacity. It used to run macOS 12 “Monterey” until recently - this is officially the newest OS version for this model. But I installed macOS 14 “Sonoma” on it using OCLP. Works great. Just make sure your machine has enough RAM and disk space (preferrably SSD).
In your first post you mention that you wanted to replace a Lenovo ThinkPad, you did not mention Mac at all. For Windows machines, the same applies as well: make sure you have a lot of RAM and disk space (SSD).
I’ve only just junked it yesterday (keyboard was playing up), but until a couple of months ago I was running Audacity on an ancient 32-bit Samsung N150 notepad. Worked fine.