Suddenly, all the edits take a long time to process, and my audio file is no longer than 24 minutes, with no more than 2 multi-tracks. I read somewhere on this forum that it may have something to do with a caching system being enabled, which I need to disable. Where under preferences can I find this? I have gone to “Edit–>preferences–>directories” but no option there to disable. Anyone have any suggestions?
Are you suddenly running out of hard drive space? Audio and video take up a lot of memory and drive space. If you’ve been editing for a while, you may have run out of elbow room. Also running a lot of applications at the same time as Audacity can cause problems, too.
Koz
I’ve got plenty of hard drive space. I’m running Audacity on an i7 processor with 8GB of RAM.
See if any of this is helpful.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_recording_troubleshooting.html#skips
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Managing_Computer_Resources_and_Drivers#resources
Koz
Have you restarted the machine recently?
Koz
Yep.
Current Audacity no longer has that “Audio cache” option, which used RAM for most data operations.
Does the partition listed in Directories Preferences as the Audacity temporary directory have plenty of space?
Have you looked in Windows Task Manager for any applications or processes using large amounts of RAM or CPU?
Exactly what edits are you doing? Some effects “under the divider” in the Effect Menu may be slow because they do have to load their data into RAM.
Gale
Hi Gale,
Basic edits such as “cutting”, “pasting” and applying effects like “normalization” and “amplification” feel like they are taking too long. I did notice multiple files being created after each edit. Is this normal? I’ve got a pretty good handle on actually using Audacity; however, the managing of the program is what’s killing me right now.
Thank you all for trying to help.
The Release Notes Missing features - Audacity Support say:
In projects containing an hour or more of total audio, there may be a delay compared to previous versions of Audacity when:
Creating a label or label track
Dragging selections with the keyboard (Workaround: Hold SHIFT then press left or right arrow a few times per second instead of holding the arrow key)
Dragging sample points with Draw Tool
Using Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete or Silence Audio.
I know your projects are a bit less than an hour in total, so I suggested looking in Windows Task Manager for some other cause.
Yes. After each edit, AU files will be added in the _data folder for the project (or in the Audacity temporary folder). This lets Audacity undo and redo edits.
However Audacity can be slow as above because of autosaving for project recovery in the event of a crash. When Audacity autosaves, it iterates through all the data instead of looking for differences between edits. If your computer is doing more than it used to be doing for any reason whatsoever, then the autosaving will slow the project down.
Have you changed any performance settings in Windows since the problem started? What version of Windows are you using? You still haven’t told us either that or your version of Audacity (see the pink panel at the top of this page).
Gale
I’m running the latest version of Audacity, and I am using a Windows 7 laptop.
We need all three numbers, please see the pink panel at the top of the page. 
In case you don’t have it already, the current Audacity version is 2.0.5 from Audacity ® | Download for Windows .
As previously suggested, look in Windows Task Manager (CTRL + SHIFT + ESC) for excessive RAM or CPU usage. Some of the tips on Managing Computer Resources and Drivers - Audacity Wiki might be useful.
Gale