Working with projects on a network file share is slow.

[FlavioB]

Hi.
I'm running Audacity 2.4.2 on Windows 10. I've placed my projects on my NAS in my LAN and I've noticed that working directly on those files results in very slow Audacity response.
Is it normal? Is it *not* recommended to work with "remote" files?
In my opinion, Audacity should actually make a local copy (temp) of the project and be working on this data. Only when saving, it should save to the shared network folder.

Thanks for your help/feedback.
F.

[kozikowski]

Is it normal?

Yes. Audacity hates Cloud Drives, too. External local drives are "iffy."

Move your work to a local/internal drive and then do production.

Audacity can't do real time audio production through network redirection, collision detection, and error management. Network drives may appear as regular drives to you, but they're not.

Audacity insists on doing a lot of work in hardware memory. It can shift to a slower local/internal drive if it absolutely has to and anything slower or sloppier than that may just fail.

Audio (and video) production is nothing like typing a message or shuttling spreadsheets around. It doesn't wait and there are no times to stop and take a breath. It's constant-on and a lot of the fudge built into storage systems gets in the way.

There's another layer of this, too. Make sure you can point to two different places that store valuable work. Internal drives and a network drive is OK. Cloud drive and a thumb drive is OK. Two folders on an internal drive is not OK.

Koz

[kozikowski]

It gets worse. Your local/internal drive should be a Solid State Drive and not spinning metal. Spinning metal can be forced to work most times, but can create problems as it fills up or becomes fragmented or sloppy.

Again, audio production is real-time, always-on. When you hit play, the machine has to produce constant, smooth data transfer.

Koz

[FlavioB]

Thank you!
I'll be moving to the local drive (already SSD on all my computers).

F.