[Audacity-users] Can I change Audacity's memory use?

[Tony Green]

As I've got a good sized memory on my machine, I could probably improve the
speed with which Audacity does things by getting it to store more data in
main memory rather than dropping it temporarily to disc. Is this possible? I
can't find anything in the documentation.

Obviously this could be achieved by allocating memory to a tmpfs partition and
telling Audacity to store its temporary files there, but then I'd be limited
by the size of the partition.
--
Tony Green
Ipswich, Suffolk, England
Website http://www.beermad.org.uk/

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[Haas Wernfried]

hi,

Post by Tony Green
As I've got a good sized memory on my machine, I could probably improve the
speed with which Audacity does things by getting it to store more data in
main memory rather than dropping it temporarily to disc. Is this possible? I
can't find anything in the documentation.

i'm still using audacity 1.0 so there could be differences to the current
version.
as far as i can see audacity uses not really much disk space for simple
operations as loading and editing files, loading a 1hr wav file and cutting
away some stuff produced about 10-20 megs of temporary data, which is less
than 5 percent (1 hr wav file @cd quality = 600 megs). on the other hand
applying effects seems to produce quite bigger files (i guess a backup
of the modified data, storing them not on disk could make sense.

Post by Tony Green
Obviously this could be achieved by allocating memory to a tmpfs partition and
telling Audacity to store its temporary files there, but then I'd be limited
by the size of the partition.

i just tried using /dev/shm as temp dir, it works quite fine, but i'm
not sure if it really helps that much. i googled around a little bit and
from what i am found (which may be inaccurate as i did not go very deeply
into it, just read some other stuff that people said on mailing lists ;)
it might not be that useful as files are cached anyway (makes the difference
in writing the file to disk or ramdisk, shouldn't be much) and the size
of /dev/shm is limited. On my system /dev/shm is ~250 megs big, if
audacity needs more than that, i can't use it anyway, if i need to use less
than 250 megs, my disk is quite fast enough so that this might not bring
too much advantage.
i think that it is not so easy to say if this is generally a good or bad
idea, it seems to depend quite a lot on that you are doing, how big your
files are, etc. in doubt, try a standard procedure (load file, edit, save)
and compare the time needed.

regards,
wernfried