I’ve got a higher end windows 7 PC that I use to process my voice for youtube videos. When I apply effects like noise removal, compressor, equalization, etc it takes several minutes for longer recordings. It appears that audacity isn’t using my CPU or RAM very much. I’ve got a 4 core i5 machine and 16GB of RAM and it’s not using the resources very heavily. When I encode video all 4 cores get pegged to 100%.
Is there a way to get audacity to use all my resources or speed up effect generation / application?
Also, is there a 64 bit version of audacity?
Thanks.
It appears that audacity isn’t using my CPU or RAM very much. I’ve got a 4 core i5 machine and 16GB of RAM and it’s not using the resources very heavily. When I encode video all 4 cores get pegged to 100%.
Your audio processing is probably less complex than your video processing… Your CPU probably isn’t the bottleneck. It may by your hard drive or data us speed… i.e. Simply making a copy of a file requires almost no CPU processing but it doesn’t happen instantly.
Although your video processing is utilizing more CPU, I’ll bet it takes longer to process a half-hour of video than a half-hour of audio.
You could try increasing the Audacity priority in Task Manager.
Audacity is writing data to disk. Are you using a Hard Disk Drive or Solid State Drive, which will be faster?
You can always use a RAM drive for your Audacity temporary or data folder which might help somewhat, but remember that your data is gone if the computer crashes.
I haven’t run it on an SSD before, just a physical HDD. I just reinstalled it to windows, we’ll see how that works. The source files are on a semi fast 2TB HDD, but I could theoretically move them before editing, but I prefer not to.
If you mean source audio files like WAV, it doesn’t really matter where those files are, except very marginally if you import WAV files into Audacity reading directly from the original. Otherwise, all data from audio files is copied into the project. Thus what matters is where the Audacity temporary directory is (see Edit > Preferences… then the “Directories” section), or where the project is saved to.
I misspoke. Audacity is now installed with windows on an SSD. The source audio files are large WAVs (2-3 gigs) and they are on a 2TB disk based HDD. Audacity’s temp file is on the SSD.
So WAVs just take a long time to process regardless? I figured there was some bottleneck I could eliminate or at least alleviate.
If you choose the “read directly” option, the first time you run an effect on the entire track Audacity will copy in the data for the WAV from the HDD to the temp folder on the SSD.
So, you could copy in the WAV’s rather than read them directly, then when you process effects you will be always be acting on the data on the SSD. You have to wait longer to import the files first time, though.
Assuming they are 16-bit WAV files and your Default Sample Format in Quality Preferences is 32-bit float, that is still 6 GB of data you are writing. So obviously you have disk input/output to consider as well as disk access.
If it’s too slow, I suggest you use a real-time DAW and not one like Audacity that writes effects to disk. Then you only have to wait for the disk write when you export or “bounce”.
