[linux-audio-user] Newcomer to the list

[Lee Azzarello]

On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 03:48  AM, Anahata wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 11:38:08PM -0400, Jesse Chappell wrote:
>
>> Sweep has a great interface, but it still has one significant
>> downside: all the audio is loaded into memory.  This prevents
>> the effective editing of large soundfiles or sessions unless you
>> have a ton of memory (or it will swap all over you).
>
> Is there a significant difference between having (a) the audio editing
> program or (b) the memory manager decide what to keep in physical 
> memory
> and what to swap to disk?

Yes. I believe Audacity only loads the graphical waveform view into RAM 
and the rest is streamed from disk. Dominic
Mazonni (audacity's lead developer) explained the exact algorithm once 
on the dev list, ending the sentence with "...and a little black magic" 
so I assume the algorithm is a bit complicated.

I have opened and worked on files over two hours long in Audacity.

-lee