I just bought a new PC and upgraded to Audacity 3. I’ve been using Audacity for many, many years. I understand the purpose of the aup3 file, but I am not a fan.
This week, having the aup3 file instead of the aup files/folder tripled the time it took to complete my work.
I produce the podcast for the Folger Shakespeare Library, which is done like a talk show. Our host is in LA and the guests are wherever they are; everyone’s in a studio and they send me files with voice, then silence, then voice, then silence, etc. I take all the audio files and sync them together so it sound like everyone is in the same room.
The raw interviews usually run 45-50 minutes and I cut them down to 28 minutes.
I normally create an Audacity project (I always name it “Summed”) where I lay in all the raw audio and then I equalize everything (levels, background noise, plosives, etc.). Once that project is laid out, I export it as a (16 bit/44.1) mono WAV file and then I start editing.
Yesterday was my first day using an aup3 project. When the Summed project got to about 30 minutes, it froze. I closed out and came back and it was still frozen. I closed out, restarted the computer, came back and tried breaking it up into smaller pieces. The files I created by doing that also froze.
I waited and waited for the Summed project to unfreeze and saved what I’d done so far to a WAV file and started editing that.
Now, normally there will be 4 or 5 times where the guest and host talked over each other. Using older Audacity, I am able to go into the Summed project, copy all the audio from one of those spots, create a new file and lay out everything so they’re not talking over each other. When I tried to do that yesterday, I could copy from the Summed project, but when I copied my tracks into a new project, the new project froze.
I have stripped new Audacity off my computer and loaded an older version.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong? Again, I understand the idea of having one singled aup3 file rather than hundreds of aup files, but this seems like a step forward and three steps back.
Richard Paul