Audacity Forum

Hi ... I've been having this issue with 2.2.3 and hoped the new version would fix it, but no luck.

The issue is that when I have a file open, whether an imported .wav or .mp3 or .ogg file or a previously saved project, clicking the "Play" icon results in a 5-9 second lag before playback begins. If it's the shorter lag, there's just the delay. If it is the longer, the "(Not Responding)" warning appears in the title bar and the hourglass icon appears on the screen. The playback occasionally begins right away, but not often. And when it does, any change—a cut, a paste, an effect, even a change in the scale of the view or moving to a different position in the file—will cause the lag to reoccur.

It's really maddening because in any given project I will make dozens if not hundreds of adjustments, and at nine seconds apiece, it's adding 15-20 minutes of work time.

System and software parameters: Win 7 Pro v6.1, (Build 7601: SP1)
HP 8560 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD
Intel Core i7-2620 @2.7GHz
64-bit OS

Any help greatly appreciated.

Check the settings in your anti-virus / security apps. They could be checking Audacity each time before allowing it to access the sound card.

Thanks, Steve. I had thought of that but I am using only Microsoft Security Essentials and Super Anti-Spyware, neither of which appears to have any real-time scanning going on, and neither of which has a setting for program exceptions (just file and file-extension exceptions). Also, I thought that since the lagging problem occasionally does not occur, it probably couldn't be a virus-checker issue, or it would happen every time. I could be wrong about that!

Just to check, I turned SA-S off entirely, and it seems to have fixed the issue!

I'll keep an eye on this situation and report back if the fix fails at some future point. But for now, you get a gold star form me!

For what it's worth, I use Spybot S&D Free edition (https://www.safer-networking.org/produc ... e-edition/), along with Microsoft Security Essentials, and cautious browsing habits. The free version of Spybot S&D has "on demand" scanning, and "immunisation" (blocks most known spyware). It also has an optional "Tea Timer" that can prompt you to scan / update, but I have that disabled. I guess that you could set up a scheduled task to scan at night, but I just scan manually, and I don't rely on Windows (my main OS is Linux).

According to this review, superantispyware does have real-time scanning, but only the paid version. I also found "How do I exclude a folder from being scanned by SUPERAntiSpyware? " in the SaS FAQ: https://www.superantispyware.com/suppor ... tml?faq=87