It literally takes an hour for it to apply the effect. What’s the cause for this? is it only me or does it work this way for everyone?
How long is the show and what else is the machine doing? Do you leave other apps napping in the background while you’re working? When was the last time you clean restarted with Shift-Shutdown?
What other effects do you use? Does Noise Reduction do that?
Koz
- 1 hour 20 mins.
- Nothing apart from having the browser open and music playing.
- No other apps.
- Eh… Never, I guess. Didn’t even know that that’s a thing.
- Using equalizer, compression, volume decrease.
- Eh… Never, I guess. Didn’t even know that that’s a thing.
Everybody hated how long Windows takes to shut down or restart, so 'normal" Windows carefully saves many of its operating parameters and settings and then stops. When you open it up again, it doesn’t have to painfully go through every process and figure everything out.
This is less handy when you’re trying to burn it off, hose it down and start over. That’s what Shift-Shutdown does. Clean Slate.
Koz
Some Nyquist plugins get bogged-down/crash when the file size is more than an hour
You could gate the audio in two 40 minute chunks using the Nyquist gate.
or use a VST plugin gate, e.g. … https://www.gvst.co.uk/ggate.htm (NB: only 32-bit plugins work in Audacity).
1 hour 20 mins.
That’s a significant show. If it doesn’t fit in memory, Audacity has to swap some work out to the hard drive to get it done. That suddenly takes tons of time over what you’re expecting.
Does your drive light flash a lot while the show is working? Do you have a lot of drive room? When was the last time you de-fragged?
Also remember a show inside Audacity is significantly larger than you think because of Audacity’s high quality internal format.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17126/windows-7-improve-performance-defragmenting-hard-disk
Koz
Some Nyquist plugins get bogged-down/crash when the file size is more than an hour
You could gate the audio in two 40 minute chunks using the Nyquist gate.
The audio file is 26 minutes so that’s not the problem.
Do you have a lot of drive room?
Yeah. on my disc D I have 600gb of free memory and that’s where I keep my audacity recordings.
When was the last time you de-fragged?
A long, long time ago… Will it help?
Yeah. on my disc D I have 600gb of free memory and that’s where I keep my audacity recordings.
You can’t choke C:, either. Audacity > Edit > Preferences > Directories. If it’s on C:, then that’s the swap location.
A long, long time ago… Will it help?
Maybe. It may give you a speed bump. Fragmentation is where the drive starts running out of contiguous space and has to save stuff “part here and part over there.” Then it does it again and has to save the work in three separate chunks. We took a drive out of service from a video editing station that was actively used for years. The analysis window was a continuous smear of bright red fragmentation warnings.
I think Win7 will try to defragment itself if you leave the machine on and active through 4AM. Google that. I know UNIX machines do that. They have a regular schedule of self-examination and repair and I think the later Windows machines do, too.
Koz
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/configure-disk-defragmenter-schedule-in-windows-vista/
Koz
Found out that I have defrag set on auto. probably set that up when I installed Windows. What else could be slowing down Audacity? I feel that the problem is specifically with Noise Gate since there’s no other plugin there that uses up so much memory and time. (40gb of additional memory, lol.)
Sometimes Tough Dogs respond to odd troubleshooting.
Can you make it worse? Open up Photoshop and a large picture, Excel, Angry Birds and two or three more. Does Audacity go into the trash bin?
Koz
Can you make it worse? Open up Photoshop and a large picture, Excel, Angry Birds and two or three more. Does Audacity go into the trash bin?
Eh… what?
Eh… what?
Since nobody has any idea what’s causing your problem, we should knock the system off center and see what happens. One of the conditions that can cause a delay in application of effects is the machine can’t handle it.
The obvious solution is strip the machine of extra jobs, restart, check the hard drive, etc, but an equally valid test is overload the machine and see if the problem gets worse. Any Change is valuable when you have a mystery problem.
Koz
I didn’t see which version of Audacity - did I miss that
Some old versions of Audacity are much slower with some Nyquist plug-ins on ‘Nix’ platforms (probably including Mac OS), but that got fixed several versions ago (long enough ago that I don’t immediately recall the exact details).
By shift shutdown you mean going into safe mode, right?
y shift shutdown you mean going into safe mode, right?
No. Apparently, this trick doesn’t have the same effect in Win7 that it does in Win8 and Win10.
So no, that’s not going to help.
Koz