Mac Performance Issues

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
1

It’s worth noting that I have tested this on the new version of Catalina (which has various issues currently) and older version of Mac OS.

I have seen performance issues related to running Audacity at full screen or having the UI occupy a large part of the resolution on Mac OS.

I have a filled specced out Imac 2019 and can confirm that this is the case. If I make the Audaicty window size about 25% of the total screen, it runs significantly better with no lag.

If I run it at over 50% of my total screen, Audacity starts using between 40-80% of my total CPU percentage and becomes extremely slow. Even small files with 1 track are very sluggish. I can’t select any of the waveform without having to wait 2-3 seconds for it to update.

Hopefully this helps the team.

Thanks.

2

What resolution is your display? It is known that the version of WxWidgets (the cross-platform toolkit that Audacity is built with) does not scale very efficiently on high dpi displays. Audacity will migrate to the next version of WxWidgets in due course, but currently some of the older platforms that we support do not work with the next version, so we need to wait until we know that we are not going to break things for older platforms that are still supported.