Audacity Forum

I'm gonna go with user error then, because I was working with an orchestral track with very wide dynamic range and I could not for the life of me get the built-in Compressor tool to avoid being over-aggressive at raising volume on the quiet parts. I didn't try very hard though, just ended up using C...

Thanks for the clarification. I ended up trying Chris's 1.2.6 compressor and - for the piece I was working with, which was orchestral with full (and I mean FULL) dynamic range in a mix with a bunch of squashed pop songs - got results that were much more to my liking when I needed upward compression....

Why also aren't their smaller ratios than 1.5 to 1? That's a real blunt tool.

I think what you're asking about is "upward compression" in which low parts are raised instead of peaks being smashed down and then ALL of it raised. You can achieve this effect in a blunt manner by selecting the "compress based on peaks" option in Audacity's built-in Compressor filter.

I'm still using the workaround in Mint 17.2. It works flawlessly with that environment variable set.

There's a related bug at launchpad on this. https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1450779

I have also experienced the garbage out + crash in Linux Mint.

Please see https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1450779

This is still badly broken on Mint 17.1, regardless of desktop environment.