I record a weekly podcast with Audacity. I was recording on my laptop (Win 10, i7 processor, 8gb RAM) and moved to my desktop (similar specs, but higher quality in every regard). On my laptop I used 2.1.0 and on my desktop 2.1.2.
I post my podcast to Bandcamp, which allows up to 600mb per track. My podcasts would typically land in the 400 range (1hr 15m on average) when I would export to FLAC from my laptop and the conversion would take maybe 5 mins.
On my desktop, I’m looking at hours (over 1.5, up to 2 or 3) with file sizes over 800mb. Not sure what is going on…
I think it is a known issue, that the export progress bar doesn’t move and time remaining goes up to many hours, if you are mixing a very long track with a very short track. Does that fit what you are doing?
However the export does complete in normal time if you just ignore the confusing dialogue and wait.
If this is the issue, it has already been fixed in our source code so it will be fixed in the next 2.1.3 release of Audacity.