I have large files, just under 1Gb and it takes 10 or 14 minutes to load the whole file. I don’t want to have to wait to load the whole file although maybe that’s unavoidable.
Is it possible to be able to have Audacity select a portion of the file to load? That is, say load the last 20% or even just specify the first 20% of a file? Or perhaps even specify a middle portion of the file say 45%-70%?
This way I don’t have to load the whole file just to analyze the last portion of the file.
This would be a nice feature to add to audacity if it’s at all possible.
It depends on the format of the file.
For uncompressed formats (such as WAV or AIFF), you can enable the option “Read uncompressed audio files from original location (faster)” https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/import_export_preferences.html
This sets out the track as blue diagonal lines while it is loading, and you can select and start working on the track before it has fully loaded.
For compressed formats (such as OGG or MP3), the entire file has to be decoded before Audacity can do anything with it.