Audacity Forum

Hi.

I have been working on a complicated mix in Audacity. After the first 5 minutes I had 30+ tracks, but I got the point where adding another track would crash Audacity. (Sorry, don't remember exactly what number it was, like 32 or something) I have gotten around it by splitting the mix into seperate segments, expoting as .WAV and the piecing them all together at the end.

Just curious if anyone had this problem, if it was truly an Audacity issue, or more a Hardware limitation issue. I'm running a C2D 1.8 w/ 2G of RAM. I did notice that when I went to playback the mix my system resources would start to strain and the pagefile usage would jump up to over a gig...sometimes it would start with a stutter.

I probably could have done a better job of clipping the tracks to be mixed closer together to save some space, but still - it seemed to be more a NUMBER OF TRACKS issue rather than total Audio time...

Anyone have a similar experience?

Audacity can't cope well with really large numbers of tracks in a single project window. You can copy and paste tracks between different Audacity windows (CTRL + C, File > New, CTRL + V) and work on a subset of tracks at a time.

The next Beta version 1.3.13 has tried to address this by changes to the gain/pan slider code. On Windows 7 I can now work with 64 tracks each of which are six seconds long. It would be great if you could test this out by trying the 1.3.13 Alpha build here. To use that, extract the contents of the zip to a new folder and double-click audacity.exe from that new folder to launch it. It will not affect any installation of 1.2.x you may already have.

Note if you are on Windows 98 or ME you need this instead.


Gale

Thanks for that info, I have completed the current project (well, as complete as it is going to get). I managed to break a 15 minute mix into 6 seperate projects and then mix them back together in a 'master' project. So everything worked out ok the workaround wasn't too terrible.

I will try out the new development version for my next project that is currently floating around in my head.