Lag issues and worse

A couple days ago I downloaded the most recent version of audacity. My project file expanded from 1.9mb to 9.3gb, it has a different extension, and it has become INCREDIBLY slow. I highlighted about 3 seconds of my recording, and pressed delete TWENTY MINUTES AGO. And nothing has happened except to say the program is no longer responding. I’m EXTREMELY pissed. I have work to get done and apparently, you’ve made that very difficult for me. Can I go back to the earlier version? Can you enable me to do that? This one is not working for me, to put it nicely.

Sure.

https://www.fosshub.com/Audacity-old.html

The last legacy version was 2.4.2. 3.0.0 had teething problems. Run away.

3.0.2 is current.

Fair warning that 2.4.2 will not open an aup3 project. 3.0.2 should open both.

Koz

My project file expanded from 1.9mb to 9.3gb

It should be noted that the AUP3 file is the whole show. The AUP file in the earlier Audacity is a simple edit manager text file. The real sound is in the _DATA folder. I’m guessing your _DATA folder of the same name is 9GB.

Without knowing any more about your show, I’m guessing you outran your machine. How long is the show and how many tracks do you have? The process is not open-ended.

Koz

Do you let your Windows machine do automatic updates? That’s not a good idea in the middle of a show. Make it notify you and then you can update at a good stopping point.

Koz

  1. I believe koz has provided you a link where you can find older versions of Audacity (fosshub)

  2. So I challenge you, right-click on your orginal DATA folder? Was it around 9GB as koz suspects?

  3. Yes, so the first time you make the smallest change to an .AUP file, Audacity is going to copy the whole enchilada over to the new .AUP3 format. If it has to copy 9GB, it is may take longer than TWENTY minutes.

Regardless of which version of Audacity you use, be sure to have a .WAV backup of your project.