Versison 3.13 LARGE project Files

Feedback and Discussion Forum Audacity 3.x Feedback and Reviews
1

Hello, I hope you are all well!

I recorded some projects that are a few hours long that are exported at 96kbps, the files sizes aren’t more than 250MB however the project files (which i saved due to markers being used) are 3-3GB.

This doesn’t seem right… Am I wrong? It should only be saving text data about time and marker positioning right? I have other audio programs with full songs with tons of vsts and data, and they barely have ever in 20 years been that large?

I read this post which is old: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/project-file-size-very-large/61718/1

And said it would be fixed in the next update, that update IS 3.13 right?

Thank you for your time. Please help when you can

2

For now I think what might be best for me, is to export the labels, which works for what i was trying to do with the project file.

I wonder what all is saved in the project files, would be nice to have options as what will save in it…

3

that update IS 3.13 right?

No. It’s 3.1.3. Do you have an official release from here?

https://www.audacityteam.org/

There are customized, non-official Audacity releases out there under slightly different version numbers.

Did you come from one of the version 2 releases? Audacity no longer has a two-part Project format. The Project has show information and the actual sound in one. It may be way larger than you think it should be.

Koz

4

If the project has only one audio track, and the project has been properly saved, and the exported file is a 250 MB WAV file, I would expect the project size to be a bit more than 500 MB. It is expected to be around double the size of the exported WAV. By default, WAV files use 16 bits per sample, whereas Audacity projects use 32 bits per sample.

If the project was exported as a 250 MB MP3 file, or any other compressed format, then I’d expect the project size to be several GB. MP3 files save space by discarding some “unimportant” data, and squashing the remaining data as compactly as it can.

While the project is open, the project could be much bigger due to “Undo” data. The Undo data is normally removed when the project is closed, and most of the space that the Undo data occupied is recovered.