Huge MB in my saved project

Hello,
when I used 2.3.2 Audacity, my project, 5 tracks, was 50 kb more or less.
The same converted project using 3.2.1 is 900 MB.
Can you help me please?
Thank you
Lollo

Are you talking about your xyz.aup project description and pointer file? Don’t forget to add in the size of all of the little audio data files: Right-click on your xyz_data directory, then select Properties.

I’m talking about Audacity project file, " .aup3" 960 MB

No! You are talking about both project sizes and trying to compare them.

We seem to be shouting at each other and neither us appear to be listening. :smiley:

You said,

and you volunteered for comparison

You are comparing apples and oranges. :confused: Here is why:

:nerd: In Audacity 2.3.2 an project consisted of a very very tiny .aup “project” file, supported by literally thousands of tiny .au audio data files. These tiny audio data files are contained in a *_data directory. This *_data directory is where the bulk of your project resides.

:nerd: Beginning in Audacity 3.0.0 the project file structure was changed. Now, everything is contained in a single .aup3 database file that contains everything. (Well, there may also be a couple of temporary files, but they disappear).

In order to do an apples-to-apples comparison, you have to add in the total size of the *_data directory. To do that, right-click on the directory and then Select Properties. Windows will add up the sizes of all of the tiny .au audio files and give you a total.

I think (hope), to understand what you mean about “apples-to-apples comparison”.
But, in my huge ignorance, I can’t understand how I can reduce the MB.
Can you give me one example please?

Perhaps you can’t. :frowning:

The developers of Audacity never intended the .aup or .aup3 project files to be used for archival storage. Hence they were more interested in creating an audio editor that would work best for, you guessed it, editing audio!

If you are concerned about the space required for storage, check out this table in the Audacity manual: File size and channel comparisons by export format, or Google “comparison of audio formats”.

One hour of audio mono will require about 310MB of storage in a .WAV file at 16 bits using 44100Hz sampling. For stereo, double that. Audacity uses 32-bits (required for repsonsable editing), so double the space again for an Audacity project. So to figure out how big your Audacity project should be, add up the time for all of the audio segments (double if for stereo segemnts), divide by 60 minutes/hour, then multiply by 620MB.

Recently, smart clips have been introduced which generally do not require additional storage. A few users have spotted some implementation issues causing audio “information” that they had thought was deleted to actually still be available and consuming space, resulting in a larger project than they expected. Those users can “fix” those bloated tracks, by selecting the tracks and doing Mix and Render. Perhaps you are one of these users.

Is there a specific issue you are having that you care to share?