Feature removed? Recording to memory instead of disk

Up until 1-3 years ago there was an option named something like “Play/record to memory instead of disk”. Why was this removed? It was pretty useful since it avoided disk wear.

If I recall correctly, it was removed around 2012 / 2013.

The feature was called “Audio cache”.


As far as I remember, there were several reasons, including:

  • The main reasons for “Audio Cache” was because some 1990’s PCs could have rather slow hdd’s. Not relevant by 2010’s.
  • Audacity was 32-bit at the time, which limited the maximum size to 2 GB (insufficient for large projects)
  • It was quite buggy
  • In the event of a crash or accidental shutdown, recovery was impossible (the entire project would be gone and lost forever)


How long do you expect your computer to last? My last PC was retired because it was too old and slow, but despite very heavy usage for many years it was still running perfectly. It’s extremely rare for drives to wear out, except for servers that are thrashing their drives 24/7 year after year.

I actually do treat it like a server and record 24/7. For me it’s a replay buffer, so 99% of the recording is discarded (I only occasionally save the last X minutes). There’s probably more efficient ways to do this, but the simplicity was nice. And I guess I was using an old version for a long time then.

If you really want to use RAM rather than letting the drive do what it was designed to do, you could create a RAMdisk and use that.
(Note: The disk must not be formatted as FAT. If you’re on Windows, then NTFS is possibly the best option).