I want to report a bug in 3.2.5 (or earlier, I tested it with 3.2.5 and 3.1.3).
I am working on a project with 4 tracks. Two tracks are 2 hours long, two other tracks are 30mins long.
When copying a small piece of one track (45 seconds tested) and pasting it onto another track, version 3.2.5 freezes for 16mins on my machine.
Filesize explodes from 2.8GB to 27GB!!!
The original WAV file of the track has 346MB.
I tested the same edit with 3.1.3 and it took around 10secs to paste the clip into another track. The file size increased by only 5MB.
Even if smart clips contain the whole track - how can the project size explode from 2,8GB to 27GB???
The file size is a big problem, but the system freezes with every copy/edit and save for up to 20mins!
Working is not possible.
The easiest edits are not longer possible: sometimes I want to cut a piece out of a track and save it in another track as a backup. This is not possible any longer. Exploding file sizes and waiting times over 10mins make it impossible to work with 3.2.5.
I like audacity very much, I use it a lot and it’s a wonderful tool. But 3.2.5 makes it unusable, if I work with tracks more the a few minutes long.
For now I will switch back to 3.1.3.
Thanks for your help.
Best regards
Richard
Edit 1: typo in file sizes
Edit 2: added switch back to 3.1.3
If so, very likely! This shouldn’t be happening. If you can easily reproduce this, send me a link to your project, along with detailed instructions on how to replicate the bug. I’ll take a look at it.
Be aware that in 3.1 a new “smart clip” feature was included in Audacity. This “feature” means that when you copy even a small portion of a much larger clip, the entire larger clip actually gets copied, only you can’t see it. Well, actually, only a pointer to original clip gets copied, so the project doesn’t actually get any bigger.
But when you do the same copy to a “different” Audacity project, the pointer won’t actually be valid, so in 3.2.0 the developers decided they needed to duplicate the original very large clip into the target project. This copy can cause undesired project bloat.
In the next version of Audacity 3.3, the developers are including a facility that allows you to control what is going on here.
In the interim, you can workaround this “feature” by reverting to 3.1.3, or by pasting the small clip into a new track into the source project (which creates only a link). The do a Mix and Render on this new track (which deletes the link). And then select the newly mixed track and copy that into the target project.
I review this for others. Unless you are making 10 pastes from the older project to the new one, it is likely you are experiencing a different issue altogether. So if you wish, send me a link and I’ll take a look at ti.
Hi and many thanks for your answer!
Currently I’m analysing my data. Maybe there is a problem somewhere.
I will get back here when I find something helpful.
And also I’m not happy about the idea to share the files at this moment.