Audacity Forum

Don't get me wrong - it's a fabulous audio editor. My experience is that up until the first save of a file, it response like lightening. After the first save of a file, with many deletions in the file, performance drops to barely tolerable. If all editing is done before the first save, no problem at all. I've experienced this with Windows Vista pro, and Windows 7 home. I experienced it with Audacity 1.? and 2.1.0.
I'm recording two hour stereo music on a Zoom H4N, consisting of music performances and rehearsals of the band and stage bands I'm in. I remove dead silence, and merge pieces of music where the director has corrections and restarts. I'm generally taking out somewhere between 40 to 60% of those two hours, couple of minutes here, couple there.
Again, if I have the time to do all the editing, insertions of silence between pieces, detecting silence to put labels on each piece for export multiple, inserting names where the silence was detected, if I can do that all in one shot, performance is great. If I have to save the work and continue later, performance is horrible, primarily due to hard drive activity. CPU used by Audacity during the excruciating waits is negligible. Saving and continuing in the same session is OK, too. It's after closing Audacity and restarting it and loading the project back in.
Help, please.

roberthill wrote:After the first save of a file, with many deletions in the file, performance drops to barely tolerable.

Are you saving to a slow drive (perhaps an external hard drive)?

steve wrote:

roberthill wrote:After the first save of a file, with many deletions in the file, performance drops to barely tolerable.

Are you saving to a slow drive (perhaps an external hard drive)?

And yet you're saying

roberthill wrote:Saving and continuing in the same session is OK

So what is the difference after reopening the project? Does View > Fit in Window make any difference?

Or by saving and continuing do you mean export and continuing?

If you don't mind, what I would suggest is that you try our latest 2.1.1-alpha development build. Get the latest build from the top of http://gaclrecords.org.uk/win-nightly/. It's a ZIP file so there is nothing to install. Just quit 2.1.0 first.

2.1.1 has an attempted fix to make editing quicker. It certainly needs testing. I have found it quicker in projects with one or more tracks 15 hours long.

Just to be safe, in 2.1.0, do File > Save Project As... and save the project with a new name, which gives you a copy of it. Then you can open the copy in the 2.1.1-alpha.


Gale

Tested Audacity 2.1.0 on Windows XP (32-bit, SP3), it wasn't slow but... some kind of unstable (got some crashes during making selections).
<offtopic>
I migrated under Tahrpup (Puppy Linux) and put together Audacity 2.1.0 (from binary tarballs): everything works perfectly on Linux. I just noticed that the additional nyquist scripts for spectral editing weren't included in audacity-data package, so I took them from the portable Windows version.
</offtopic>

vpd wrote:Tested Audacity 2.1.0 on Windows XP (32-bit, SP3), it wasn't slow but... some kind of unstable (got some crashes during making selections).

Off topic to this, but please start a new topic if you can provide exact steps to reproduce the crashes. Do the crashes only occur in one particular saved project, or do the steps reproduce with any arbitrary audio?

vpd wrote:<offtopic>
I migrated under Tahrpup (Puppy Linux) and put together Audacity 2.1.0 (from binary tarballs): everything works perfectly on Linux. I just noticed that the additional nyquist scripts for spectral editing weren't included in audacity-data package, so I took them from the portable Windows version.
</offtopic>

This is the Windows board. That doesn't sound like anything to do with Audacity. Please report the packaging problem to your distribution, if that package is intended to be 2.1.0 release.


Gale