Audacity 1.3.2 beta is hogging all my RAM on a simple import

[David Fox]

I'm attempting to import a longish mp3 (about 185 megs) into audacity
so I can do some simple editing. This isn't new to me, but maybe the
mp3 file is so long when uncompressed that it's way too large to edit
within my system space (have amd64, 2 gigs RAM, 2 gigs swap, and
plenty of space in $HOME.)

I've done cd-sized edits (wav files of 700+ megs, to edit out and fix
endpoints and other parts of the file for raidio shows I've downloaded
and subsequently burned onto CD, in older versions of audacity with no
problems. I only have large file spaces when I do complex edits.

I've already set things up in Preferences to use $HOME as the
temporary file rather than a directory in /tmp - simply because there
is not enough space on /tmp, and /tmp isn't placed on a separate
partition.

I've done these types of edits without problems, on less capable
hardware (athlon 1000 using debian lenny, mandrake and other OSes) so
I don't see why audacity needs to eat up all my ram and swap space for
something like this. I'm successfully able to bring in a smaller mp3 -
about 50 megs / 50 minutes' worth of audio, without straining
resources noticeably.