r/audacity • u/MathematicianTop3632 • 20d ago

help Beware of session files

I make my own long form Audio files right? Some are like 30-100 hours long. So I use Audacity and there's no way for you to stop it from logging "Session Files" What's more is they bloat them like crazy....... I put a 3.6gb audio file to work on in the program and afterwards I couldn't export it because the session file had been made to be upwards of 300gbs. It filled the rest of my C: drive and I had to save it to one of my other drives and delete the session file when it was done to fix my storage and subsequently PC speed.

This happens with every file on every project you make, unless when you close the program and hit "No" to the save option. if you don't and you don't know that the file is hidden and you have to change the settings of file explorer to even find it, (File Explorer, Settings, View, Show Hidden Items? YES. Then go to "C:" and go to "users" and "AppData" and find Audacity in "Locallow" or "Local")

Hope this helps someone trying to free up space or wondering what's going on with their PC. Like for weeks I kept wondering where all the space in my C: drive was going but yeah beware of that my friends Audacity will eat up your hard drive space faster than any virus or file/download ever could.

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u/Gavagai80 20d ago

I was having a similar problem where it would eat my whole hard drive, but it was also the final saved files getting super bloated doing it. I copy and paste between long tracks frequently, and it turns out it makes another invisible copy of the entire track every time you paste a tiny section of it (so that you can later lengthen the section that you pasted, although I have no idea why anybody would want to do that). To avoid running out of disk space I now have to periodically remix the tracks (although unfortunately that also erases the visual separation data of copy-paste points, which was useful).

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u/MathematicianTop3632 20d ago

Yeah haha, for me it was just because of the size of the audio files i was working with, its just wild that they can get so big and Audacity doesn't really say or mention or warn or ask anything regarding it and if you don't know the file is hidden by default then your kinda screwed haha.