Audacity very slow at starting up (~10 seconds)

I’ve had an issues for a while, in that I find it annoying that my Audacity installation takes so long to start up (approximately 10-11 seconds from when I run the application to when the when the main window appears.

Is this just how it is meant to work? And if so - are there any plans to optimize it?

If this is not how it’s meant to work is there any way to troubleshoot this issue?

I’m using the newest updated version 3.0.5 (but the issue has been the same for many versions).

The issue is the same on both my Windows 10 home desktop and my Windows 10 professional laptop.


Appreciate any help insights you can offer, as other than this issue I’m very happy with Audacity.

1 Like

Getting the same now. Very frustrating

If I had to guess at it, I would say your machines have a modest amount of memory or even if you do have enough, Audacity doesn’t have access to the memory that’s there. When that happens, Audacity has to share with the hard drive. That will immediately take longer than you think it should.

This isn’t a spreadsheet, PDF, or a text message. Sound production can take up tons of room while you’re editing.

I passed a recommendation that when you buy a new machine, it’s a waste of money to max it out. That hasn’t been my experience. Also, if you are doing a bunch of work on The Cloud, that can cause all kinds of problems. Audacity hates cloud drives.

Koz

It’s taking 8-10 seconds for me. I hadn’t noticed it being a problem and I’m OK with it.

My computer is fairly new but nothing special except for a SSD.

GoldWave (a commercial “competitor” to Audacity) takes about 2 seconds.

My Audacity takes three seconds on two different SSD Macs.

Koz

Thanks Koz. Will I have some 8GB or 16GB free at the point of starting Audacity 3.3.3 which takes 24 seconds for the UI to appear! The splash screen appears at start for 3 secs and then vanishes.

The only cloud related thing is OneDrive which Windows almost always installs by default these days. And anyway, it really just syncs a local folder.

I do have a couple of mapped local LAN drives to my NAS where I store media.

24 seconds is excessive in my book. Looking at taskmanger it appears in background tasks but is not doing anything much with CPU, Memory or Disk. Once the UI appears it appears under Apps

Can you make it worse? Sometimes when you get to Full Stop, you can get more information by Changing Something Major nobody is expecting.

Disconnect the network. Pull the plug or disable the connection. See what happens to the startup time.

It can’t possibly be this so we’re not going to check it?

That’s the other user connecting. When was the last time you did that thorough virus scan that takes all night?

And in that same line, have you ever done a Clean Shutdown? Shift+Shutddown > OK > Wait > Start. Not regular Shutdown and not Restart. Pay attention as the machine goes down and particular attention to any service or system that complains.

Koz

I run a full AV check and reset (shift +reset) every week at least. Just did again - no issue.

For fun I disabled OneDrive sync and disabled wired connection (wifi already off).

What does make a small positive difference of a few seconds is turning of my RodeCaster Pro II Digital interface.

No dodgy services running either.

I see log errors too so might be time to raise a bug.

15:12:17: Audacity 3.3.3
15:12:17: sqlite3 message: (1) no such table: project in "SELECT 1 FROM project LIMIT 1;"
15:12:17: Error: Failed to load shared library 'avformat-60.dll' (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
15:12:17: Error: Failed to load shared library 'avformat-59.dll' (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
15:12:17: Error: Failed to load shared library 'avformat-58.dll' (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
15:12:17: Error: Failed to load shared library 'avformat-57.dll' (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
15:12:17: Error: Failed to load shared library 'avformat-55.dll' (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)

Well the docs indicate FFmpeg is no longer distributed with audacity - but why would it be an error unless I use it. It seems these errors in log should be advisory warnings only!

Also the link on the support page goes to a download page that looks incredibly dodgy - both URL and download spam link images. Though later it gives the github source repo link.

Will ignore those log errors until I need to run a conversion that required FFmpeg

And the SQL table error is benign.