Audacity 4 beta-2 settings

Macbook M4, macOS 26.5.1.

I started playing with beta-2 and immediately ran into a strange problem where effects other than Audacity’s could not be enabled.

After spending a lot of time documenting the issue with steps to reproduce and all, it occurred to me that 1) Muse wouldn’t put a version out for testing with this big a problem, and therefore 2) the alpha version may have left some corrupt settings behind. So I trashed the “Audacity 4” folder inside the audacity settings folder (in my case ~/Library/Application Support/audacity). That cleared the problem.

So my warning to everyone: if you’re trying out beta-2, and you previously ran an alpha version, clear your settings.

3 Likes

Hello @billw58

Thanks for your report!

We know about this issue; it’s down to the changes we made to the format of the known_audio_plugins.json between Alpha and Beta releases.

The minimal fix for this is to delete ~/Library/Application Support/audacity/Audacity4/known_audio_plugins.json, launch Audacity and perform a full audio plugin rescan (click ‘Validate’ in the ‘Audio plugin validation’ dialog at startup):