My girl friend and I run a heavy metal podcast out of Houston Texas and have been using Audacity since we started about 6 months ago. We finished editing our 11th episode today and went to convert to .WAV and we were astonished at the time it said it was going to take to convert. When we finally hit cancel the time was sitting around 5 and a half hours to convert to .WAV and it was steadily getting longer. I am not exactly sure what we are doing wrong here (we are not doing anything different from our previous episodes) our other 10 episodes took only about 20 minutes to convert for us. Can anyone help us out here?
Did you fill up your hard drive? Audacity famously takes a lot of elbow room when it’s working on something and if you already have eleven episodes under your belt your drive could be a very busy place.
Did you put punctuation marks in your filename? Dates are notorious for causing problems. Try saving the show to the desktop with just plain a-z text characters and numbers.
Koz
It always helps to tell us which version of Audacity you are using. Please see the pink panel at the top of the page.
If you are using 2.1.2 there is a bug listed in the 2.1.2 Release Notes
When exporting or rendering a longer mix and one or more tracks are much shorter than the others, the progress bar will appear to show no progress and “remaining time” will increase continually. However the mix or export will complete normally in reasonable time if you wait for the progress dialogue to close.
If that’s the case, such as you have a short intro on one track and the whole show on another track, have you tried just waiting for the usual time you wait to see if export completes?
Or, select all tracks and Tracks > Mix and Render and the problem should go away.
The bug has already been fixed in our source code so it will be fixed in the next 2.1.3 release of Audacity.
Gale