Hi! I’ve seen a lot of people on this forum talking about this problem, and would like to corroborate their accounts. I work in VO, not music, and use the copy/paste function about 50+ times even in one small recording. In Audacity 3.4, my paste creates a whole new clip (instead of simply inserting the copied audio into the track) so I’m constantly joining the clips…which I can no longer do simply by clicking the line between them - another new thing. Additionally, by the time I get to the 50th paste-and-join, the program starts gving me “pre-processing (not responding)” errors, slowing the work down greatly, and causing me to have to close the program and reopen it, or worse, export my recording and start fresh in a new project. Just wanted to let y’all know in case that makes a difference to future versions. I’m on Windows 11, by the way. Thanks!
If I am working on a project that somehow gets bloated and slow, it is fairly simple for me to copy everything to a new project by
- Ctrl+A
- Ctrl+C
- Ctrl+N
- Ctrl+V
Then, when prompted select to NOT copy smartclips. Even better to do this before the project gets bloated and slow. 
As Peter says in another post:
Thank you so much, jademan! These are great solutions on their own, however they can’t solve the overarching issue which is that these updates have created an inefficient workflow for many VO users who use paste like crazy. As they sort of mention in the other thread, perhaps a new version could create a PREFERENCE option for how pasting works, a toggle switch maybe – that way VO people could paste without creating a new clip and music people could choose the opposite. Just an idea for the designers if they’re reading this. In the meantime, I’m reverting to 3.3, but I look forward to what comes next!