Project no longer Compacting when closing a project. Huge file size, almost no file content

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Normally when closing a project, I’ll see the popup that Audacity is “compacting” the project. I no longer see that happening on one of my projects, and the file size keeps growing.

The project is from a single .wav file, and I’ve copy/pasted portions of it with a single track in the project. Here’s what it looks like now, having a file size of 3.7 GB (from a .wav whose size was 600 MB)

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No matter what I do, I can no longer get the project to Compact when closing it.

To test this to the extreme, I deleted all but just a single 12-second clip from the project. When I save and Close, or close Audacity, the file size for this project is still 3.7 GB. Closing Audacity doesn’t cause the file to compact.

If I delete that last clip, then the file size does drop to almost nothing.

Is there a may to manually for the project to Compact? Why would the project be so large, despite having so little content it it?

Thanks.

2

My understanding is that Muse believe they have fixed this in the latest release 3.6.4

Peter

3

That’s the version I’m using. I updating to 3.6.4 today just to see if it was an issue with the version I had been using. But that didn’t immediately resolve the issue for me.

I did, however, make a little progress with this. I found that if I dragged a different large audio clip (~600MB) into the project (on a new track), that seems to have gotten the project’s Compacting working again. I added the new audio file, immediately removed it, saved and closed, and I saw the Compacting popup appear again for the first time. And the resulting compacting cut the file size significantly, as expected.

What I don’t know yet is whether the project will continue to Compact as I keep working on it, or whether it’s still in a weird state where I’ll have to perform this workaround from time to time.