Disk almost full?

[youngjd]

I am not even halfway through editing my show creation on audacity and its already telling me my disck is almost full? The last time this happened I couldnt save once I reached a few more imports. I was sure to delete alot of stuff plus I also have everything I wanted on a flash drive to not put it on the computer directly! I just downladed 2.0, I had the last update and I had the same problem though! Please help!!

[steve]

How much free disk space do you have?
Has the project that you are working on been saved? If it has, where is it saved?
How big is the project?
Where and when is the message occurring and what exactly does the message say?

[youngjd]

I dont know how much space I have left . This is the warning message I'm getting: there is very little free disk space left on this volume. Please select another temporary directory in preferences

[steve]

What sort of Mac do you have?
Do you know which version of Mac OS X you have? (for example: "Lion")

[Gale Andrews]

I dont know how much space I have left . This is the warning message I'm getting: there is very little free disk space left on this volume. Please select another temporary directory in preferences

That's a good error message.

If you are in the middle of an unsaved project and you need to free disk space in the temporary directory, click View > History, select the bottom item in the list, press the up arrow in "Levels to Discard" until you reach the highest number possible, then click "Discard". You will not be able to Edit > Undo any of your previous actions in the project, but you will now have space to do more work on it.

Then after you save or export your project, but before you quit Audacity, click Audacity > Preferences, choose "Directories" on the left, and look at the Audacity temporary directory listed there and how much space Audacity says it has. If you have another drive with more space, change the directory to the one that has more space, then click OK.

If you are always running short of space, consider setting "Default Sample Format" in the "Directories" section of Preferences to 16-bit. This takes only half the disk space and is almost as good as 32-bit float unless you are doing a lot of edits that change the volume of the track. For most purposes, "Default Sample Rate" in the same section of Preferences should be 44100 Hz. If it is a lot higher, you get very slightly better quality, but it takes a lot more disk space.




Gale

[waxcylinder]

I would suggest buying an external USB disk to take all the files that you don't use or need on a regular basis to free up space on your disk.

It is never good to run any computer with its disk nearly full - it's a recipe for disaster.

WC

[wasleys]

Apart from any space Audacity needs to work OSX likes plenty of spare space to work.

If getting an external HD (which makes sense for backup as well as this problem) I would suggest FireWire rather than USB.

To find out how much space you have select the HD in Finder and hit Command-I or Go File > Get Info.