Directories Preferences

Click on any of the other Preferences sections in the above image to go directly to that Preferences page.

Temporary files directory

• Location: Sets the location of Audacity's temporary directory. This is used whenever there is audio data that hasn't yet been saved as an Audacity project. Exit and restart Audacity for changes to the temporary directory to take effect. Make sure the temporary folder is on a fast (local) disk drive with plenty of free space. If you need to use a network drive, consider the "Audio cache" option below.

If your drive does not have sufficient space, you can reduce the space taken by temporary data by going to the Quality tab of Preferences and reducing the default sample format and sample rate. Reducing the sample rate will noticeably reduce higher frequencies, so is only recommended for speech data.

Audio cache

• Play and/or record using RAM...: Turns on use of RAM (memory) for most activities that normally use the disk drive. Checking this option causes recordings to be written to memory instead of to disk, with the data being copied to disk when recording completes. This can help ensure accurate recording if the Audacity temporary folder is located on a slow network or portable drive, but for most machines this option should be left unchecked.

Choosing the Audio Cache option means that recordings that crash in progress cannot be recovered.

"Audio cache" also caches:

• data from imported files (except when uncompressed files are read directly from the original file - by default, a warning for uncompressed files will appear giving the option to copy in the file if preferred, which uses RAM)
• data from opened project files
• all data edits.

All data once captured to RAM is stored in memory for the length of the Audacity session. Using this option for long recordings or extensive editing will result in large memory use, with the possibility of sluggish performance or an Audacity crash, unless the machine has many GB of available RAM and you set the "Minimum free memory" level high enough for your system (see next item).

• Minimum free memory (MB): Audacity will use RAM until your total available system memory falls below this level, then will write data to disk instead. The default is 16 MB. Setting the level below this default has no effect, because Audacity will maintain a minimum of 16 MB in order to safeguard your computer against crashes.