I don’t know the inner workings of the feature, but I’m able to comfortably multitask as it’s doing its thing. I work with audio clips up to around 10 minutes, which is around the same time the downpitching takes to finish. If possible I’d like to reduce that time spent to finish, and at the cost of my ability to multitask.
Thanks 
That seems very slow. How exactly are you doing “downpitching”, with what settings, and with which version of Audacity?
I use the high quality stretching option and a negative percent change of 20% to achieve the lower vocals and etc. I’m currently on version 3.4.0.
*I’m downpitching through the effect tab, pitch and tempo, then change pitch.
I’ve just tested that with Audacity 3.6.1 on an Intel i7 with Linux, and a 10 minute stereo track, sample rate 44100, takes about 16 seconds to process.
Audacity 3.6.1 also has a “real-time” stretch option that is applied on the fly, so you don’t have to wait at all, provided that your computer is fast enough to run the effect.
Did you enable the high quality stretching option? I’m pretty sure that’s what causing it to slow down significantly, but it also improves the audio greatly.
Did you enable the high quality stretching option?
Yes. Without that option enabled it completes processing a 10 minute track in a couple of seconds.
Wow, that’s interesting. I’ll try updating and tweaking a few settings then.
It’s still taking a long time for mine to process it. I have 32gb ram, a 6 core intel cpu and a rtx 3060 6gb vram.
The processed audio could be longer than it appears because of non-destructive editing.
I believe Audacity is only using 1 core.
The problem “may” be specific to that old version of Audacity. I recall there was some sort of problem with the “high quality” setting somewhere around 3.4. At a suitable time (NOT while you are mid-way through a project), perhaps you could try a different version of Audacity (NOT 3.6.0 as that is known to have some serious issues). The current version is 3.6.1.
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