Issue with spectrum - hangs on long tracks

[Caesius]

I'm currently editing long audio tracks into a rather large project -- or at least it will be; when it's finished it should fill out an 80-minute CD, and so far I've got around 15 minutes down.

The first 10 or so minutes were fine; I mixed an 8:19 track into an 8:36 track to make a 16:36 track. However, when I went scanning the end of the second track to find a suitable place to mix the third track, the spectrum hangs. Here's a screenshot:



The black lines are from when I tried to zoom in again after the spectrum apparently hung.

My computer has an Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ (2.19GHz) and 2GB of RAM.

Does anyone know how to keep the spectrum analyzer from hanging? I'd really prefer not to use the waveform.


Edit: I'm editing .wav files by the way.

[Caesius]

Bump.

[waxcylinder]

The spectrum view is an incredible devourer of compute resources - it is much much compute-intensive view than either of the Wave views

My personal preferred view to work in is Waveform (dB).

As an experiment I just switched my view on a playing project at a similar zoom level to your posted clip - and it took Audacitity around 40 secods to re-calculate the Spectrum view.

Why not try working in Wave or Wave (dB) and then switching to Spectrum only when you really need it. I used to switch to it for identifying clicks, but only when well zoomed in, where the clicks show up as pink lines.

WC

[Caesius]

Yeah, I've since gotten used to the waveform. I used the spectrum for identifying the basslines since it was clearer than the waveform, but I think after a certain point the spectrum just stops working or takes too long to render to be practical.