Audacity Forum

I ran a long recording, about four (4) hours, and when finished exported it in MP3 format. When I clicked to exit Audacity, I declined to "Save Project". The software then produced a small window with a message something like "cleaning up temp files", which continued for at least half an hour, not letting me shut down Audacity while it proceeded. I lost patience and rebooted the computer.

How long should it take the software to delete all these files? I thought the software may have been stuck in a blind alley somehow.

Now I assume that there may still be "temp" files left from my four hour long recording. Where are these files, so that I can delete them and free up the space on my hard drive?

Thank you.

I think you got more problems than missing temp files.

A four hour recording clocks in at just under 4GB of space. Pull the show into Audacity and export to MP3 and that can be 4 more. You need to keep 15% of your hard drive clear during production, so that's how much drive space? And not just space. It needs to be clean, thoroughly defragmented and error free.

Audacity always manages work uncompressed and takes up a lot of room to do that. Audacity will not work into a compromised drive. Temp files and capture scratch files are different and we'll need one of the Windows elves to drop by.

Koz

Check your Exported file, there's a chance it may be corrupt.

Exporting very long files can be problematic and slow. With very long recordings it is generally better to select shorter sections (say 1 hour) and use "Export Selection".

Audacity should automatically detect if there are any temp files left over and offer to clean up the next time you start Audacity. You can check this manually by looking in "Preferences" (from the Edit menu) to find the temp directory.

As Koz said, make sure that you have plenty of free and unfragmented disk space at all times.