Audacity Forum

I've been doing a podcast for two and a half years now, and I've always used Audacity because it's worked fine. Last week, I did a factory restore on my laptop (an Acer 5532) because it was geting really cluttered. This week, I downloaded Audacity (the latest version) again in order to put my show together. But I have a problem. Every time I try to do an action (cut, paste, silence, whatever) Audacity slows up, freezes, says "not responding," and eventually does the action almost a full minute later. I'm a patient guy, but I really don't want to spend hours and hours putting a podcast together when it usually only takes me 1-2. So my question is: Why is Audacity running so slowly, and what can I do to fix it?

chaingunpope wrote:I've been doing a podcast for two and a half years now, and I've always used Audacity because it's worked fine. Last week, I did a factory restore on my laptop (an Acer 5532) because it was geting really cluttered. This week, I downloaded Audacity (the latest version) again in order to put my show together. But I have a problem. Every time I try to do an action (cut, paste, silence, whatever) Audacity slows up, freezes, says "not responding," and eventually does the action almost a full minute later. I'm a patient guy, but I really don't want to spend hours and hours putting a podcast together when it usually only takes me 1-2. So my question is: Why is Audacity running so slowly, and what can I do to fix it?

How much total length of audio is in the project?

At what point exactly in the editing does the freeze occur? When making a selection? After that but before the progress bars for the effect occur? While running the effect? Or after the effect progress bars seem to have completed? The latter is known to be an issue.

1.3.13 has an issue that some keyboard actions may create a *short* hang if you are working with a more than an hour or so of audio and and you make the key presses very fast. So if you are making selections with the keyboard, make slower, individual keyboard presses.

Also make sure at Edit > Preferences: Directories that you have not enabled "Audio Cache". This uses RAM for most data processing. It will only be quicker if you have a very large quantity of installed RAM, otherwise it could eventually slow processing down or cause a crash.



Gale

How much total length of audio is in the project?

About an hour and a half. It's usually about this length, but I've never had this problem before.

At what point exactly in the editing does the freeze occur?

It goes like this: 1.) I highlight a section. 2.) I click cut. 3.) Audacity freezes up, then the cut occurs almost a minute later.

1.3.13 has an issue that some keyboard actions may create a *short* hang if you are working with a more than an hour or so of audio and and you make the key presses very fast. So if you are making selections with the keyboard, make slower, individual keyboard presses.

I am using (and have always used) a mouse for my editing.

Also make sure at Edit > Preferences: Directories that you have not enabled "Audio Cache". This uses RAM for most data processing. It will only be quicker if you have a very large quantity of installed RAM, otherwise it could eventually slow processing down or cause a crash.

It's not enabled, and it never was.

OK, you can scratch all this. I was just working on another project (one considerably smaller), and Audacity ran just fine. It must just be an audio length issue; I'll have to tell my podcast buddies to keep things closer to an hour. Thanks for your help, though.

Are you running out of hard drive space? Is your hard drive highly fragmented? Audacity will not run into either of those. An hour and a half stereo show is a lot of data -- particularly if you're doing effects and editing on top of that. A fragmented drive will slow Audacity to mud.

Koz

What version of Windows are you using (for example, XP or 7)?

A few people (all on XP so far) have been complaining about excessive delay in 1.3.13 (but less so in 1.3.12) doing non-effect actions that don't have a progress dialogue like Silence, Delete, Cut and Paste - these should not take all that long. The problem is much more evident in longer projects.

I've only tested this in WIndows 7 so far, but I can see no difference at all between 1.3.12 and 1.3.13 - in a 75 minute stereo track it takes over 30 seconds to silence or cut a 15 minute section of audio, and 30 seconds to undo it. The difference with 1.2.6 is vast - those actions only take 2 or 3 seconds in the same circumstances.

Please can you try 1.3.14 alpha on a long project of over an hour and see if it is improved? To use 1.3.14 alpha, 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 remove the installation of your current Beta version.

Michael has made changes in 1.3.14 alpha so we are not doing complete TrackPanel refreshes as we were in 1.3.13 Beta. On Windows 7 this has made a big difference to Silence, Delete, Cut and Paste which seems as fast now as in 1.2.6. It hasn't helped those actions on my Ubuntu Netbook which are still very slow.

This fix doesn't seem to significantly help hangups compared to 1.3.12 when dragging selections with the keyboard or when adding a label. The selection dragging problem I am sure is mainly due to autosaving every key press. I'm not so sure about the problem adding a label.

P.S. While Koz is correct that if you are short of disk space, processing takes longer (the disk must thrash around harder to find somewhere to write the data) it doesn't explain the differences between Audacity versions that some people are seeing.



Gale

Are you running out of hard drive space? Is your hard drive highly fragmented?

No and no.

What version of Windows are you using (for example, XP or 7)?

Windows 7.

Please can you try 1.3.14 alpha on a long project of over an hour and see if it is improved?

OK, actions take like 3-5 seconds to do, but that's a vast improvement over what I was working with. Thanks a ton.