Been using Audacity for MANY years now and suddenly noticing with the most recent install on a new Windows laptop, the cursor jumps forward by increments during playback rather than moving smoothly like it’s always has on the past?
Am I missing something? Thanks in advance for any help or light you can shed on this for me!
Audacity’s drawing performance is very closely tied to the width of the window. If you were on a 1366x768 screen before and now upgraded to something with more pixels, it’ll lower the draw rate significantly.
Audacity currently is being ported to Qt, and as part of that the entire waveform rendering will be rewritten which should bring performance back into the realm of what’s expected for a 2D window.
Would adjusting my video settings make any difference? Or maybe backing up a few build versions?
The only thing that helps is making the window thinner - either by using it on half width (or quarter width, or even smaller), or by lowering your screen’s resolution.
As for builds, older versions of Audacity won’t help. If you’re technically well versed and willing to put up with bugs, you can try compiling this branch: GitHub - crsib/audacity at 2531_waveform_rendering. It ports the rendering to Direct2D/OpenGL with great performance gains (it renders at 500 FPS on my machine), but also is very broken in most other ways. This particular attempt has been abandoned, so it won’t get updated further.
Thanks a ton for your prompt and helpful replies!