Massive Podcast File Sizes in Audacity 3.0.5

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hey folks.

Hoping for some professional advice on getting my Audacity project file sizes way down.

I’m working in Audacity 3.0.5, producing an hour long podcast weekly.

The typical episode consists of the following components:
Two locally recorded MP3 files for each host, about 100K KB each.
Intro/Outro Music reused every week that i saved as an MP3 file, file size 132k KB.

To start production every week I start a fresh file at project rate of 44100, bit rate 32 bit float.
I import the intro/outro music mp3 file and save. This week that results in a AUP file size of 2.8GB.
There is only 20s of audio in that intro/outro mp3. What the heck?

By the time we add in the mp3 files for our two hosts and edit the full hour, we are getting an AUP file size of 6-10 GB. I have a TB hard drive, but I’m constantly having to delete old episode production files to leave enough room to save fresh files.

Why are these production files so gigantic, and seemingly getting bigger all the time?

2

The size of Audacity projects ballooned with the introduction of non-destructive editing.
“smart trimmed clips” in Audacity 3.1 … https://youtu.be/HpA138b-J9s?&t=66

3

So there’s no way around this?

4

If you don’t need to save it as a “project” you can export to an audio file (WAV, FLAC, MP3, etc.)

You probably don’t need to save/archive the project forever.