Irrevocably removing audio from project

Audacity Help Forum
1

Hello,

I use CTRL+I a lot to cut recorded clips. Often I remove quite significant amounts of audio that I’m never going to need again, but Audacity helpfully keeps them around so I could get them back by dragging at the clip boundaries. That’s certainly a nice feature to have, but is there any way I can tell audacity to forget everything not currently visible? Or “freeze” a clip if you will?

The reason I ask this is because I’m dealing with longish projects where I sometimes remove hours of material, so the savings in project file size should be significant. I would like to keep the project files around for archival purposes.

I know I can “mix down”, but it’s incredibly slow, destroys my envelopes and is conceptually not what I’m trying to achieve.

Thanks a lot! I know this sounds like a really dumb question, but I swear I’ve googled all kinds of things to no avail. I guess I don’t know how to phrase it right…

2

Yes, in 3.3.0 a new feature was introduced that allows you to copy tracks into another Audacity project, without all of that extra “junk”.

To do this, Ctrl-A, the Ctrl-C in the old project to “copy”. Then File > New to start a new project, then Ctrl+V to paste into the new project. Be sure to Paste Selected Audio Only.

PasteScreen

3

Awesome, thank you for the fast reply! This just immediately saved me over 13 GB. Unfortunately it’s a very slow process and involves temporarily duplicating everything on disk, but seeing the Audacity’s current velocity and the fact that this option now exists, perhaps an in-project solution will make it in at some point in the future :slight_smile:

4

This is a good idea. :grinning: Perhaps you would like to make an enhancement request here: Issues · audacity/audacity · GitHub