Update to New Apple M1 chip (macOS BigSur)

Hi, I don’t know much about programming and even sound editing, so I can’t give many details.
I am also not sure, if this was already proposed by someone else, in which case I am very sorry.

I recently have a new iMac that runs on the new Apple M1 chip (with the operating system MacOs BigSur) and Audacity is very slow on it unfortunately, for example the line showing where I am on the timeline only moves in little jumps which makes it more annoying to cut single words etc. I use Audacity a lot to cut my weekly podcast.
I read that Audacity is not yet compatible with the new Apple chip. I’d love you someone to update it.

Thanks a lot for having created this easy to use tool :slight_smile:

The jerky movement of the recording/playback cursor is an issue with Macs that have 30-bit displays, which I imagine the latest iMacs have.

With Audacity not running, right-click on the Audacity icon and select Get Info. In the Get Info window, check “Open in Low Resolution”.

Does that help?

– Bill

oh wow amazing thank you. that works!

For anyone trying to do this on a more recent version of Mac OS X the “Open in Low Resolution” checkbox is gone. You can still get the same effect by manually editing the Info.plist file in the app.

sudo vi /Applications/Audacity.app/Contents/Info.plist

then change

<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
<true/>

to

<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
<false/>

This fixed the laggy UI for me on Monterey on an M1 macbook pro.

Found this via https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qh2e3u/urgent_no_open_in_low_resolution_mode_in_monterey/

Signed up for the sole reason to say thank you to dmertl for posting the answer. I have a MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) with an M1 Pro and 32GB of ram. However Audacity was unusable without this change.