Audacity starts to produce spitty distortion, then stops responding

Using Audacity 3.0.2.0 on Mac Pro 5,1 macOS highSierra 10.13.6, 12 core and 32GB ram.

While editing a single voice over file, over the course of 15 minutes to half an hour Audacity starts to produce spitty distortion, then stops responding to keyboard commands, then while attempting to play the file it produces a steady buzz, without the source audio. This requires shutting the whole system down and rebooting, after which the sequence of events continues as described above.

Also, while auditioning small segments of audio, a split second of previously auditioned audio plays prior to the selected audio, making precise editing almost impossible.

I used Audacity for years with excellent results. Now with this new improved version, it doesn’t work.

Any tips?

Thanks.

Nick

I moved this post to it’s own topic where hopefully, it can gain better traction.

Are you running out of disk space?

Check this post for information on reverting to an older version of Audacity: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/sound-distortion-playing-back-recorded-audio-from-pc/61406/2