Playback cursor outpacing playback

[Breakfast]

I've noticed ( and I think this is since upgrading to 2.1.2 from a 2.0.x version ) that I seem to be getting a bit of latency between the playback cursor moving over the wave-form and what I am hearing. Although it's a small difference it slows down my editing process quite a lot ( working with spoken word podcast ) because the cursor is never at the exact point I need to make the edit, so I have to hunt around a bit to find it.

I'm working with ten mono tracks ( five silenced ) on maybe an hour long show, which is a fair amount of data but prior to upgrading it seemed to work alright.

Is there anything I can do to reduce this- either in terms of how I use audacity or switching up to routing audio through Jack and an external sound card?

I'm using Mint 17 on a PC that was pretty high spec a few years ago.

[steve]

Big projects (both number of tracks and length of project) will tend to reduce responsiveness. Muting tracks does little to help because much of the delay is from the graphics rather than playing the audio.

Some tips to minimise this:

1) Splitting a project into sections. I generally prefer to work on sections that are no more than about an hour duration, which on my hardware allows me to have over 40 tracks with virtually no noticeable "lagging".

2) Ensure that all tracks have the same sample rate as the "Project Rate" (the Project Rate is shown in the bottom left corner of the main window). This avoids having tracks resampled on the fly.

3) If possible, use Jack Audio System.

[Breakfast]

This is good information, thank you.

Given that some of my muted tracks are effectively pre-processing originals I keep for back-up in case of over-enthusiastic noise gating killing something important, I may be able to shift those and break the project into shorter sections, combining that with Jack should make enough difference to help. Really useful, thanks.

[steve]

Let us know how you get on.