NEED HELP URGENTLY! - "Out Of Memory" Pop up!!

[DGD]

I am making a 25 minute long audio drama, (IT IS DUE BY 4/21/18, SO I NEED HELP QUICK!).

It is stereo and I recorded each of my voice actors lines one at a time so that I can mix them all together using Audacity, there are probably about 150 in total, and it has been going great until recently, I have about 15 minutes of it completed and ready to show, but yesterday when I was importing audio files, and I probably did 10 before trying to play it back. I tried to play it back and then it popped a box saying "Out Of Memory!". Then another box showed up in the top left corner saying, "Error opening sound device. Try changing the audio host, playback device and the project sample rate.". I did all that it asked and I still couldn't play any audio. Now today when I tried to open the .aup project, audacity will not even open, it just says "Audacity is not responding".
My computer has 4gb of ram, Windows 10, and Audacity 2.2.0.
I did not add in any special effects to the audio that would cause this, I didn't do anything irregular. The entire project is due on the 21st of this month so I need a fast solution.

Thank you for taking the time to help me.

[kozikowski]

Do you have backups of your performers readings? It is recommended that you export WAV sound files of each live reading from each performer and keep them in a safe place. That gives you the joke that production is mostly bookkeeping. That allows you to post a clean edit even after your computer goes up in a ball of fire.

"Out Of Memory" messages can mean your hard drive filled up. There's no way to fix that other than moving stuff off the drive and putting it all somewhere else.

If an Audacity Project was running when that happened, that may be the end of the world for that show > know where your actor backups are.

Koz

[steve]

Transferred from the other topic:

there are probably about 150 tracks in total

That's a lot of tracks.
Audio has to be buffered before it can play, which means copying a bit of audio from each track into memory (I don't know which memory Windows uses for this, but it could be limited in size).

Are you able to merge some of the tracks so there are less tracks?
(If there is empty space in one track, an audio clip can be dragged vertically into the space using the Time Shift tool. Hold the Ctrl key down while you drag if you wish to retain the exact same time position.)