I have a custom built computer running Windows 10 Home 64-bit with a BIOSTAR TA970 Motherboard, Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD, 32GB G.SKILL ARES RAM and AMD FX-8320 Eight-Core Processor(@ 3.5 GHz-I also have a NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 1GB (MSI) ) and exporting 9 hours of audio at 220-260 kbps(MP3- LAME version 3.99.3) take an hour-and-a-half. Doing it at lower bit-rates doesn’t really help either. It takes the same amount of time on my laptop(@ 2.1 GHz & 6GB RAM). Needless to say Audacity is using next to none of my resources. Is there some way I can allocate more resources(RAM and CPU) to Audacity in a conventional manner(through a GUI)? I am already placing the program at top affinity in Task Manager and priority at “Realtime”. Tags; “slow”, “slowly”,“RAM”,“CPU”,“Allocate”,“fast”,“faster”,“quicker”,“export”,“exporting”,“MP3”
Hmmm… I just tried a 2-hour concert and it took a little more than 3 minutes. I’m on a “slower” computer (3.1Ghz i5 processor, 8 GB RAM, regular hard drives).
Your hard drive may be the bottleneck (even though it’s an SSD).
…With video files (and different software of course) I can sometimes cut the rendering time in half by rendering from one drive to another (2 hard drives in a tower system). But, when you’re making an MP3 that’s maybe 1/10th the size of the raw Audacity data you wouldn’t save much time. And with an SSD, I’m not sure you’d save any time since the there is no drive head jumping back-and-forth between the read-file and the write-file.
http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/TestClip/Record_A_Clip.html
Are all your drives local? No cloud or Network Connected?
Nothing leaps out at me except the 9 hour thing. Audacity holds a show in 44100 (unless you changed it), uncompressed, but not regular 16-bit, but 32-bit Floating. That’s so you can apply effects, corrections and filters without bothering to check if the show sound overloaded or not. 32-float doesn’t overload.
But that does give you eye-wateringly large files, much larger than you think. Worse, some effects and filters make copies of the Whole Show as UNDO.
Since two different machines did this, I think show size is a good candidate.
Did you create a nine hour podcast? How long did it take you to cut it?
Koz