Audacity keeps crashing and/or going extreamly slow

Hello, so I got audacity to work on an audiobook. Everything was going great. I recorded about 4 hours on a file and everything was smooth and fine…yesterday while I was trimming down the audio, I noticed some odd lagging that I haven’t experienced before. I easily restarted it and it was fine the rest of the night. I go to sleep, and the next morning I open it up and try to open my file, It was stuck loading for over 10 minutes, then it opened up. I started to edit again, and it was literally loading after every click I did on the screen. I restart and the same result, I restart again, it takes 20 minutes to open, and it takes even longer to edit because the lag is even worse. I ex out and save an AUP file on my drive, open up again, and now it crashes after loading for 20 plus minutes…what in the world is going on? Everything was fine before yesterday night. I updated to 3.03 and everything, and it still gets progressively worse every time I try to access my file. What is this problem? It’s not my computer because I still got plenty of space and can do anything else fine on it…it’s only when I open audacity and try to open my file. (p.s. this is due by the end of the month, so it’s really annoying how it decides to act up now for no clear reason ha)

If anyone can help, please do, because so far out of all the cracked-out research I’ve done today, no one has experienced a problem like this, so I’m completely perplexed.

I would export your project to a .WAV file, then close Audacity and import the .WAV file into a new project.

That’s the thing, I can’t even access audacity with this file anymore. All I have is the AUP3 file, and every time I attempt to open it now, it loads forever then crashes.

The last time I was able to open was yesterday afternoon. I was told that the AUP3 file would be fine to save as to open up audacity later, so I didn’t save it as another type of format because that was the recommended file format for an unfinished product. But with every attempt I have at the opening I get the spinning wheel then crash.

Is there a way to open the AUP3 file somewhere else where I can access the audio?

What size is the AUP3 file?
What is the file name and full file path?

Have you tried rebooting the computer, then launching Audacity 3.0.3, then opening the AUP3 file from “File menu > Open > select the file”?

The file is 4.37 GB

The path is “iCloud Drive⁩ ▸ ⁨Desktop⁩ ▸ ⁨ACX⁩”

And yes, I tried that a lot, to no avail since yesterday.

Is this a problem with 3.03? because so far I see no solutions

With Audacity closed, copy the AUP3 to your “Documents” folder, then launch Audacity and try to open the new copy.
(“cloud” drives are not suitable for “live” Audacity projects. They are OK for storing AUP3 files, but you are likely to have problems if you try to run the project from a cloud drive)

also, every time it crashes I get a message that says

Exception code 0x1/ Click send to report to Audacity

Ok, I’ll do that. It’s still loading extremely long (like it is now) But I’ll update you if it ends up working or not

Yea so it’s still taking unacceptably long. I tried it under documents, downloads, and even google drive, the same result. It’s really weird because I opened this multiple times yesterday and it went through, but now I can’t even do it. I don’t know what made it so slow to process when it was completely fine before and I did nothing to the file other than save multiple copies to different outlets. It’s not corrupted because all the data is on the file how I left it. If anyone from audacity can message me to help walk me through this would be greatly appreciated. Like I said, this is due really soon and I’m still getting nowhere with any of this.

in fact, can someone jump on a zoom with me today so I can show you exactly what’s happening?

If you can just open it once, and then export as WAV, then you can try jademan’s suggestion.

Ok I’ll keep trying

If you want, upload it on a public server, then PM me a link; I’ll look at it.

cool, sent!

I did not get it. That is I never got a PM.

Weird, I just sent again, it must have went to a draft

just let me know if you got this one. I’m new to this forum, I didn’t know my message didn’t send

Got it. Tomorrow…

So far, I have been unable to extract any data from this project. I have turned it over to the developers. We’ll have to wait for their report.