Help! Effects suddenly taking 10-20x as long - can't complete project!

I’ve been using Audacity several times a week since June 2024, and on bigger projects since the first of the year.

Yesterday all of the effects suddenly became much, much slower - and look to be getting worse.

I’m editing interviews of about an hour, either one or two tracks, and frequently adjust the volume a few seconds at a time. It usually takes well less than a second (looks instant), but yesterday it started taking several seconds, and now it can take about ten seconds to amplify a few seconds of data. (I used my phone clock to check.)

The only forum topic I could find on this was from 2014 at Sudden slowdown

I’ve using Audacity 3.7.1 in Windows 10 on a Lenovo Legion 5 with 16GB RAM. The SSD has 130 GB free. The processor is Intel(R) Core™ i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.59 GHz.

I restarted Audacity several times and restarted the laptop after a full shutdown.

I’ve shut down all other programs except one chrome window to check this forum and my associated email.

Following that article, I checked my SessionData file for Audacity (in C:Users//AppData/Local/audacity and found it empty. I don’t see any other temp file for Audacity and that’s the location that a search provided.

I’m at a loss, and have over twenty hours of editing to complete by Friday evening - that’s with the effects taking very little time as usual.

Can anyone tell me what to do or something that I’m missing?

I’m not super tech savvy btw, though I can usually follow directions if I can ask questions to clarify.

Please help! This project is very important to me, and having logged in hundreds of hours using Audacity since June, it’s kind of a system shock.

Thank you!
Richard

Replying to my own cry for Help because I think I’ve found a solution, but having come across a couple other accounts of this, I’m putting this down here in case it helps someone.

I eventually figured out that it was a problem with the individual aup3 file, not with Audacity or my laptop or some messed up settings somewhere - something happened to it, it got corrupted or something, who knows what, but it was maddening to have an effect like amplifying a few seconds of sound take more than ten seconds (and impossible to work with). I was looking for accounts of this happening to anyone anywhere I could think, and through the Audacity reddit found someone mention that it had happened only one file.

Here’s how I solved it (I sure hope) in case this is of use to anyone.

I’d edited about half of that file but had saved the original (i.e. started with “Interview 1” and saved as "Interview 2) before I’d started the edit. Found that Interview 1 was fine, so I saved as “Interview 3” (to continue keeping the original intact) and cut the half that I’d finished with. Then I copied the finished half directly from the messed up “Interview 2” aup3 file - That didn’t work, in fact it caused the same issue with the untouched second half. But when I used Undo on that paste, the original part of “Interview 3” was fine again.

Second try did work : I saved the finished edits (first half) from “Interview 2” as a .wav, and dragged that into “Interview 3” to replace the unedited half, and it totally worked.

Now I can continued editing from there, though I lost half a day to figuring this out.

Hope that’s useful to someone somewhere sometime.

Richard

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