Audacity Forum

steve wrote:Turn off Unnecessary Applications
Defrag Your Hard Drive
Give priority to "Background Services" ( Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced tab. Click the Performance "Settings" button and select the Advanced tab. Under Processor Scheduling, select "Background services" )

Thank you, that helps! I also gave Memory Usage priority to System Chache, increased Virtual RAM and turned on "Play and/or record using RAM (useful for slow drives) so now audio is chached in memory not in my old drive

"Play and/or record using RAM (useful for slow drives) so now audio is chached in memory not in my old drive

That may help in the short term. Computer memory is the sprinter. Blistering fast performance for a short time. Disk Drive is the long-haul performer. That's where you need to put the two-hour show you decided to make of crickets chirping.

Internally, Audacity works at really high quality and takes up a lot of room. Particularly on an older machise, you're going to run out of hardware memory in very short order -- worse, you're going to find out all about that ratty stick of memory that few programs use -- until now.

Even if you do use the hard drive for live capture, there are limitations to that, too. "I tried to record BBC-1 for nine hours and my computer crashed." How full, fragmented, or slow is your hard drive?

Live audio (or video) production retires many computers.

Koz

kozikowski wrote:That may help in the short term.

That's what I need - 3-4 minutes of playing.

kozikowski wrote:How full, fragmented, or slow is your hard drive?

It's 298 GB Total/295 GB Free, unfragmented (Disk Defragmenter says that).

kozikowski wrote:Live audio (or video) production retires many computers.

No, I use it for a vinyl cutter (homemade )

OK, I'll disable it and check out the results.