discarding history

[AlanHK]

When editing some 60-minute tracks, I noticed some strange behaviour after applying some simple filters.
The right channel had disappeared, with no warning messages.

Eventually I worked out that the temporary space was full.

I had several GB free on that drive, but every simple filter I applied added 600 MB to the storage used by Audacity, till it ran out of space and started screwing up.

The only way I can see to delete these backup files is to close the project and restart it.
Is there a way to discard old backups short of this?

"Infinite undo"is nice in theory, but requires infinite space in practice.

And please don't just advise me to buy a new hard disk. I'll do that when I can afford to.

[kozikowski]

I don't know of any way to eliminate the UNDO buffers while Audacity is still alive and expecting them to be there and working. I usually use 700MB per hour of high quality show, so your experience is about right.

You know what the problem is, so I don't think we can be any more help. There is a minimum machine that can handle all these tricks gracefully.

Koz

[steve]

View menu > History
Select the number of Undo levels to discard and click on the "Discard" button.

Not surprisingly, this action cannot be undone.

[kozikowski]

Can you do that in 1.2?
Koz

[steve]

Yes, it also works in 1.2.6

There was at least one version of Audacity (possibly 1.3.7) that had problems with the Undo history so this may not work for users running non-current release versions of Audacity.

[AlanHK]

View menu > History
Select the number of Undo levels to discard and click on the "Discard" button.

Thanks, exactly what I needed.

Having this on the "View" menu no doubt makes sense in some way, but I never thought to look there.
(I'm not alone, since kozikowski with over 7000 posts here was unaware of this too.)

Is it a bug that there was no error message or alert when it ran out of space?

[kozikowski]

<<<Is it a bug that there was no error message or alert when it ran out of space?>>>

Well, yes but it's a bug shared by most major operating systems. We warn people to keep at least 10% free space on their machine at all times -- usually on each drive. If the drive space goes to zero the machine will cheerfully run right off the end of the cliff -- usually with no warning except the machine goes "insane."

You in particular would not want a watchdog process running because it would slow the machine down. Given how tight the machine is, you would not be able to continue editing.

<<<(I'm not alone, since kozikowski with over 7000 posts here was unaware of this too.)>>>

I don't know of any other posting of someone trying to edit a 60 minute show on a machine whose resources are that tight. Now you know why there's more than one elf.

Koz

[AlanHK]

<<<Is it a bug that there was no error message or alert when it ran out of space?>>>

Well, yes but it's a bug shared by most major operating systems. We warn people to keep at least 10% free space on their machine at all times -- usually on each drive. If the drive space goes to zero the machine will cheerfully run right off the end of the cliff -- usually with no warning except the machine goes "insane."

Nothing crashed, but Audacity just "lost" a track.

That kind of thing really should merit an alert, preferably with an advisory on how to discard history. Having it just delete data by itself without any indication of why was not expected.

[steve]

Nothing crashed, but Audacity just "lost" a track.

Arguably better than crashing and loosing everything.

Having it just delete data by itself without any indication of why was not expected.

I would have expected it to crash, or at least freeze - most other programs do when you completely run out of space.
When you are not doing other things, Audacity shows the estimated space remaining in the status bar at the bottom.

[AlanHK]

Nothing crashed, but Audacity just "lost" a track.

Arguably better than crashing and loosing everything.

Not sure if I agree. If I hadn't noticed this, I might have saved over the original data and permanently lost it.
Having a major error with potential data loss and not telling the user is not a good "feature".

Having it just delete data by itself without any indication of why was not expected.

I would have expected it to crash, or at least freeze - most other programs do when you completely run out of space.
When you are not doing other things, Audacity shows the estimated space remaining in the status bar at the bottom.

I can't see this (in 1.3.9).
The same area with "Project rate", "Audio position", etc? Or where?