are Macros intermediate Steps only RAM?

Win 7 Audacity 2.3.2
Hi, on Macros, are the intermediate Steps written to disk or are managed just in RAM?
if they are written to the Hard Drive, is there a way to make them only in RAM? [in order to avoid extra writes to the Hard Drive, to take care of it, to make it last…]

eg Macro with steps 1,2, 3 and 4, I would like that only the resulting Wave data after Step 4 to be written to the Hard Drive [for ‘Undo’/‘History’/Crash recovering reasons, (but actually I would like an option for having all data only on RAM -even if forfeiting Crash Recovery that is barely used-, one would save Project/Export only if wanted…)]

It depends what’s in the Macro. If there are multiple audio processing steps, they are applied sequentially, reading from disk and writing to disk.

You could create a RAM disk and set Audacity’s temp directory to use it.

Don’t expect a huge increase in speed if you use a RAM disk, especially not compared to a SSD, unless you are processing huge tracks. If you are intending to process huge tracks, be aware that each process requires around 600 MB per channel per hour of audio, so you can quickly build up several GB of data.

For some of the more complex processes, processing time can far outweigh disk I/O time.

My issue is not about speed but about preserving the Hard Drive by avoiding writing to it, to make it last longer.

Maybe I will post a feature request [although I’m thinking maybe people don’t care much about preserving the HDD…] about options to working only in RAM [I don’t have extra to make a RAM Disk].

Thx.

I’ve replied here: To protect HDD, work only on RAM

I’ll close this topic so as to avoid the confusion of parallel threads.