iMovie: "Disk Responded Slowly" Alert

When recording a voiceover using iMovie an alert with the message "disk responded slowly" may appear.

Symptom

When you try to record a voiceover using the audio recording feature an alert with this message appears:

Solution

Quit other applications before recording audio in iMovie. Do not try to switch to another application while iMovie is recording audio.

Your computer may also have a fragmented hard disk. Frequent creation and deletion of files can cause disk fragmentation. This means that available disk space is not found in contiguous blocks. Although it's not a serious issue, it causes the disk to respond more slowly while you are importing media.

If you see this alert, copy the project to another disk, or consider using a disk defragmentation utility to defragment the disk where the project is located. See technical document 17933 "Macintosh: About Defragmenting Your Computer's Hard Disk" for additional information on disk fragmentation.

Related documents

93460: "iMovie: Using FileVault Can Affect Performance"
Published Date: Oct 11, 2016