Audacity slows down after a while until it's unresponsive

Very sorry for my English.
When you edit hours of audio, Audacity will sometimes slow down by 2x each time you make an edit. Feels like it stops responding for 10 seconds, then 20, 40 etc. making it unusable. It’s bad when your audio reaches the .WAV file limit of around 4GB, so you can’t save it as 32bit float each time you have to restart (i guess you can save the project, but still you have to restart multiple times, which wastes a lot of time). Is it something known, or is it my PC acting up?, but other programs run just fine.
I use the version 3.0.5, a Samsung 860 PRO 512GB SSD (there is always free space), an i3-10100f and 16G DDR4 ram, and nothing of those parts seem to be reaching 100% when Audacity becomes unresponsive.

Also, I’ve got a question (nothing too serious) - is it possible to make the UI more responsive (render it in 60+hz)? It feels very slow to use, just like when you move the mouse in a game that runs at 15fps. You can change the Playback Meter refresh rate to maximum of 100hz, but weirdly not the other parts of GUI. The zooming also sometimes renders at like 5fps.
(I don’t whine about low framerates, it’s just for a reference of how slow it feels).

The recent introduction of non-destructive editing could be the cause.
The smart clips can contain much more audio than first appears, so will take longer to copy.

It’s in 3.1, but i use 3.0.5.
Even if i was using smart clips, i wouldn’t have the issue because i don’t use them. Something different is wrong.

I don’t think the smart clips functionality can be switched off.

This is a good thing to double-check. After starting Audacity and loading your project, do Help > About Audacity. If you’ve every downloaded 3.1 or later, it is possible that is is erroneously running on your machine. Later…

So the first thing I would check is to make sure the .aup3 project file is located on the local machine and is not being accessed via a network or cloud.

Then assuming everything is local, I would check the size of the project file to check for possible project bloat. If I generate a 1 hour mono audio track at 44100Hz, and save the containing project, the .aup3 file will occupy roughly 630MB. So if you have a 4GB project file for a 15 minute recording, you know something is quite wrong.

If you do find something “quite” wrong, in addition to reporting it here, you can do the following (after first backing up your project):

  1. On each track, perform Tracks > Mix > Mix and Render
    or
  2. Export each track to a .WAV, then reimport into a new project.

The auto update is disabled for me, and the .exe shows v3.0.5.0

I’ve checked the size of the projects, and sometimes they reach 50+GB, but why would it work and suddenly stop working… And it doesn’t happen always, sometimes I can edit for hours, and just when it starts slowing down I reimport the file, causing it to lower in size drasticly, but it still slows down just after a couple of edits. Is there a program maybe that logs what’s happening?

Yes. So the way to be sure is to do Help > About Audacity after you have started.

So if you open up a project and amplify all of the audio by .001, your project size doubles immediately as Audacity retains all of the original audio for its UNDO operation.

I generally close, then reopen Audacity projects after I do heavy editing to discard that UNDO buffer, and to reduce related overhead - it is going to have to be discarded eventually, so I do it sooner rather than later. :smiley:

I think I may be having the same issue. I just sat down to edit the first file after updating earlier this week, and

  • every time I save, the file size seems to double. It went from 500mb to 1.5gb, while the file content should have gotten less. Exporting and reimporting the tracks only brought it down to 1.2gb, which seems wildly out of proportion for a file of less than 45 minutes.

  • the program gets so slow that it’s virtually impossible to use. I need to wait at least ten seconds for every single click to be processed, adding / deleting / muting audio takes respectively longer, and takes up ALL of my CPU, even when nothing else is running. Restarting it does not solve this issue, it just continues to be exceedingly slow / become unresponsive immediately after startup.

Is there a way to fix this? Can I reverse the update?

So a 45 minute stereo recording should occupy a little over 1GB, so 1.2gb is not unreasonable. Audacity projects save audio in 32-bit float, while a .WAV is 16-bit fixed. The float is preferred for an editor as it allows intermediate waveforms to vary wildly in magnitude without losing their integrity (accuracy).

What version of Audacity are you running? Do you have multiple Audacity projects open at the same time? There can be a side effect when you copy a clip from one project to another. When you copy even a small portion of a very large clip from one Audacity project to another, ALL of the information from the original very large clip gets copied, resulting in project bloat. To prevent this from happening, copy the clip to a new track in the old project, mix and render that new track, then select the audio from that new track and copy that to the new project.

Be sure that you do not have a browser running in the background. Even when they are sitting idle they can be enormous memory and CPU hogs. It is generally best to restart your computer every so often; if things are starting to slow down - that is a good time to do so. Also, it is best not to work on a project that resides (or is mirrored) on a network or cloud drive.

Older versions of Audacity can be found here: Old Audacity versions download

oh thank god I found this post - I was starting to think it was just me.

Does anyone else also notice that copying across tracks take an impossibly long time? Sometimes I even see that my taskbar icon reloads, which sort of implies the program was restarted. I have wanted to know if it’s part of the same problem or a different one.

So a 45 minute stereo recording should occupy a little over 1GB, so 1.2gb is not unreasonable.

Most of my audio is mono. A 42 minute file with the same setup form the previous Audacity version is 460 MB. I am pretty certain this is not what the file size ought to be. Especially the “growing as I cut things out” part. I know it gets bigger as you work because it retains the entire undo history. But that content should be purged when I close the file, no?

What version of Audacity are you running?

I’m on the latest update, 3.2.2.

Do you have multiple Audacity projects open at the same time? There can be a side effect when you copy a clip from one project to another. When you copy even a small portion of a very large clip from one Audacity project to another, ALL of the information from the original very large clip gets copied, resulting in project bloat. To prevent this from happening, copy the clip to a new track in the old project, mix and render that new track, then select the audio from that new track and copy that to the new project. Be sure that you do not have a browser running in the background. Even when they are sitting idle they can be enormous memory and CPU hogs.

Copying clips between files has been slow since a few updates ago. And yes, I do that regularly - to add snippets of music to audioboks. But these all come from their own track anyway (I have it cut into the lengths I need, so I only ever copy that whole track). While this was slow, it was still workable - that has change dnow.
I do cut out bits of audio to collect (basically to create a blooper reel). Cutting, pasting and mixing this every time I want to drop a three second snippet into my blooper file seems extremely impractical. At least being able to manually purge this superfluous content would help a LOT. I cannot close down and reboot the software every five minutes while I try to get through an hourlong voice track.
But even with that superfluous content issue discarded, this speed issue persits if I only have a single version of Audacity and Word open. I am unable to edit in any timely manner because every single time I try to silence a second of background noise, or delete half a mispronounced word, it takes ten seconds upwards.

It is generally best to restart your computer every so often; if things are starting to slow down - that is a good time to do so. Also, it is best not to work on a project that resides (or is mirrored) on a network or cloud drive.

All my files are local on C. I just tried again after a fresh reboot. And Audacity nearly crashed just when I tried to copy a track, without making any changes.

I’m going to try and roll back to the last version now, and hope that this gets resolved in future updates.

You don’t say what version of the software you are running, so I will assume 3.2.2. Copying from one track to another within the same project should be fairly quick as only a pointer to the original track is copied. However, when copying even a small part of a track to a different project the ENTIRE original track is copied. This can cause serious project bloat and unforeseen delays, particularly if the original track is long. The developers hope to include a solution to this issue in 3.3.0. :smiley: (Note: they are currently working on 3.2.3.)

In the interim, to prevent this project bloat, first copy the selection to a new track in the same (original) project, then do a mix and render, then select this rendered track to be copied, and finally paste into the different (new) project.


I haven’t associated this symptom with issue. I’ll try to pay more attention in the future. :smiley:

Yes. In this case I would say you have an issue. Others have suggested exporting tracks to WAV files, then re-importing. Personally, I have found that Mix and Render works fairly well. Another trick: for each clip in the track, grab the top of the edge of the clip to see if it is a “smart clip” and can be extended out. If so, then you have located the hidden audio information causing project bloat. You can remove this bloat on a clip by clip basis, by dragging the bottom of the edge of the clip back to highlight it, then pressing delete. Be sure to check the other edge of the clip.

That is what I was thinking…

Just so you you know, even if you split a large track in to a hundred little tiny pieces, each tiny piece still has all of the audio information from the original large track. :open_mouth:

I wish you the best with this. The developers are hoping for a fix in 3.3.0 :smiley:

Yup I’m always on the latest version. I rarely copy across projects, but rather just from one track down to the track below. It usually takes half a minute. It’s not just copying across tracks though. Today I’ve been editing with my task manager open, and I can see the memory usage go up by around 10MB with every single edit that I make in the project, and then when it gets to 1GB I have no choice but to restart the program. So I’m thinking either there’s something wrong with my installation, or it’s saving my edits in an inefficient way?

So that is entirely possible. Note that Audacity retains UNDO history of what your audio was prior to every edit so as you continue to make changes, your project size will grow. Also, Audacity stores audio information in 32-bit float compared to a .WAV file which is 16-bit fixed which takes up half the space. Also compressed files such as MP3 files take up even far less.

If you amplify all of the audio in a new project by only .001, the size of your project will double.

If I do a lot of editing, I exit Audacity, then restart.

YUP. I’ve begun noticing this notoriously, after recording for longer than 6 hours (audiobooks) Noise Reduction and De-clicker suddenly craps out. Testing my sanity. Which is maddening. I end up trashing what otherwise was a whole next section of perfect chapter reading, while refrain from screaming, and slamming something.

My guess is the newer Windows updates that have really poked holes in a few interfaces, including Focusrite. Which has behaved bomb lately. Barely shutting down at normal rate. I haven’t yet reached out to v.o. friends about this, inquiring if they’ve faced similar setbacks. But guess is… they probly have. Even if they use Macs.

So I meant to say, If I do a lot of editing, I save, exit Audacity, then restart. :smiley: