Software Update: Audacity 3.0.2

Version 3.0.2 of Audacity has been released. Available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, this open source audio editor can record sound, import and export wav, aiff, ogg, and mp3 files. The program has an unlimited undo function and also has a large collection of effects on board, such as fade-in and fade-out, echo, tempo change and noise reduction. More effects can be added easily as the program supports both vst and ladspaplugins. The release notes for this release can be found below.

Better Diagnostics:

As well as bug fixing we have also added more detailed reporting into Audacity to track down some hopefully not too common problems with the new format we introduced in 3.0.0. If you see an unexpected error message with a “Show Log…” button on it, please send the log to [email protected], tell us how the problem happened, and whether it’s repeatable. We think, but do not know for sure yet, that some problems some users of 3.0.0 have had may be caused by networked drives which are slower than drives on the same laptop. We’ve increased a ‘timeout’ which should fix that.

Macro Output:
Users of the Macro feature in Audacity to process multiple files will find there is a new preference, Macro output, for where the results are put. The old way of doing things puts the results with the files being processed. You can still do that if you want to keep doing it that way by adding an extra step in your macros.

Untangling Code:
In parallel with 3.0.2 and 3.0.0 work, we’ve been doing a lot of other work on Audacity on another branch that is for the future and not in 3.0.2. Paul Licameli has been untangling dependencies in Audacity and making many graphs of the structure to guide what to untangle next. Here is a small extract of one of those graphs.

If code is hard to work with, we work more slowly. These changes to untangle the code should make Audacity more flexible, and make it easier to work with the code. We kept these changes out of 3.0.0 and 3.0.2, as the changes were substantial and the important aup3 work took precedence. Hopefully the more flexible cleaner structure will be a big win for future versions of Audacity.

Bug Fixes:
3.0.2 has some simple to do but important bug fixes. The compressor effect was not working for longer selections. We were also very occasionally getting an error messages at start up of Audacity, requiring a restart of Audacity. You can read more about what we did for 3.0.2 on the New Features page of the manual.

Progress!
We hope you enjoy Audacity 3.0.2. We’ve made the big move to aup3 format and Paul has untangled a lot of our code for easier future work. We’re hoping we can now start moving forward more quickly with more visible improvements with these changes done.