Paste (Command V) Works Very Slowly

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
1

Audacity 3.0.2
Computer: iMac 21.5 inch, Late 2015
macOS: Big Sur

This is kind of a weird problem (for me anyway, hopefully not for somebody). I am doing an audiobook. While doing this, I create and copy 0.8 seconds of silence to use between sentences. I then paste that 0.8 seconds of silence between the two sentences I want (overwriting the extra time and flubs and whatnot). A couple minutes into the timeline of a long chapter (about an hour of recorded time that I would eventually carve down into half an hour), the paste started to give me the rainbow wheel for a few seconds before pasting. Another dozen pastes, and it is taking over three minutes for the wheel to stop spinning and do the edit.

Playback, copying a section (command c), silencing a section (command l), etc, are not affected and do not produce a lag. Just when I paste. I opened up a different chapter of my book, and the paste works fine on that chapter. (Though I am worried other chapters will develop this problem as I keep editing them. The problem crept into this chapter as I was working.) I think it is a file problem. Shutting down Audacity does not work. Rebooting the computer does not work.

Any suggestions from somebody who has also had this problem?

2

So on Windows, I generated 1 hr of audio and randomly pasted several dozen .8 second clips in the audio, and was unable to duplicate this problem.

Have you tried Save Project > Backup Project, then working from that backup?

3

It isn’t a problem for my other files either. I just finished editing the next chapter that I recorded right after the one giving me problems, and the paste command worked fine the entire time. It seems to be just that one file. I’ll try your suggestion.

4

It looks like I fixed the problem. :smiley: I exported the problem track into an MP3, and then I imported the MP3 back into Audacity. Now the past command works again!