inhibit scratch and backup areas

Win10/Audacity 3.1.3
A recent topic “Error: Disk full or not writable” provided comments about Audacity’s use of memory, both in RAM and on disk (be it HDD or SSD).
Were I editing the audio-book “Chris Greaves his life and times - 1946-2019-” I would probably buy a separate HDD/SSD for the backups and recovery of this very important work. :laughing:
But when I am editing a piece of JSMill or JSBach, a mere thirty seconds long, well of course I place little importance on my time.
For one thing, there is a nightly backup of all data to a USB drive, and then a grandfather backup to a separate USB drive each Sunday night.
In short, I am not too worried about “losing my work in Audacity”, whether it is my memoirs or a piece of non-fiction.

My limited understanding is that Audacity goes to great lengths to manipulate my data in a safe and secure manner; good for Audacity.
Indeed I can hear my HDD on the Acer Pressario (probably not even for sale anymore) churning away in the background; whole lotta shakin’ going on.

I suspect, but do not know, that if there were a Preferences toggle for “inhibit all backups, checkpoints, interim saves” that my crude editing work would proceed much faster.

I am not well-versed in Audacity terminology, but given my usually simple editing tasks, i would trade any sort of security for a stripped-for-speed version of Audacity available through such a toggle. This would be the equivalent of removing all but the driver’s seat in my 1993 Hyundai Excel automobile that is used solely to carry me about town.

Question: Is such a modification to Audacity possible?
(the answer ought to be yes. but …)

Question: So how expensive would it be?
(the answer ought to depend on how well Audacity is coded; how easy it would be to test the toggle at each point where any sort of backup or safety write-to-disk occurs).

Thanks, Chris

Audacity’s free competitor, OCENaudio does open and save audio quicker, but it’s not as powerful an editor, e.g. only single track, (not multi-track).

You can discard some of the previous incarnations via History …
https ://manual.audacityteam.org/man/undo_redo_and_history.html
That will free-up some space, but will limit the number of undo’s that you can do.

With regard to how Audacity handles data, you can read all about it in as much or little detail as you like. The AUP3 file is an SQLite database file: SQLite Home Page


That sounds rather like the old “AUP + _data folder” format, used by Audacity 1.x and 2.x.

If you don’t need the new features of Audacity 3.x in your “stripped down version”, then you could simply keep a copy of Audacity 2.4.2 and use a “Portable Settings” folder for the 2.4.2 version so that the two versions don’t interfere with each other.

Portable Settings: Portable Audacity - Audacity Manual
Old versions of Audacity: Old Audacity versions download