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When I drag and drop MP3s (about 200 MB) into Audacity, Audacity somehow takes up a huge amount of hard-disk space (10GB+).

(This though is temporary. Once I've exited Audacity and not saved the "project", the 10GB+ of space that was taken up is freed up.)

Is there any way (any tricks) to prevent this?

(If it matters, usually, all I want to do is for Audacity to help me speed up the MP3s and export the sped-up MP3s.)

Destroy666
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user2071051
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2 Answers2

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Audacity preallocates space for temporary files. Depending on various settings, such as audio quality, the files can be quite large.

Though I know of no way to change the size of those files, their location can be changed.

Audacity Directories

In the Preferences: Directories dialog, change the Temporary files directory to a more convenient location, e.g., a drive with more room, or a location more easily monitored to be sure cleanup is effective after closing the project.

However, allocating that drive space is almost instantaneous, since nothing is written, other than the file size and location, and, if there is sufficient room, and cleanup works correctly, it's safe to ignore the temporary files. Do not delete them while Audacity is running, though, because work could be lost.

DrMoishe Pippik
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Here's how Audacity exactly functions:

  • Whenever you import an .mp3 file, you modify a temporary .aup3 project, which is a format specific to Audacity.
  • That format stores audio as uncompressed PCM because that allows more accurate, lossless editing. Each added audio file also gets converted to it.
  • Any changes are also stored because of the undo functionality.

So no, you can't do anything do decrease the size, that's just how the app is supposed to work - as a high quality editor.

For basic editing like speed/tempo changes, ffmpeg could be used, e.g.:

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -f:a "atempo=1.5" output.mp3

Which would also make batch brocessing easier if you want to apply the same parameters to many videos.

Destroy666
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