Audacity Macro Conversions getting dumber

Hello,

I have been using Audacity since 2015 on an almost daily basis.
I was quite happy till the Legacy Macro stuff was introduced.
Since then it got better and worse.
A lot of new cool stuff is really nice to see.
But the stuff that matters most for me has suffered.

#1 Longer loading times. Not so bad.
I know. Bigger program, more ressources, yadda, yadda.

#2 Legacy Output stuff.

#3 Older versions automatically detected the Audio frequency / Sampling rate.
when I did a conversion from a quiet 16 or 24 bit file.
48 was converted to 48.
96 to 96 and so on.
I hoped in future updates the automatic bitrate detection would
also appear. It never did. Instead the automatic detection
for Audio Frequency stopped “working”.
I know, I can do this and that and a little bit more here and there
and everywhere.

I come to realise that there are more and more trade-offs.

Good feature A gets introduced, therefore good old feature B must suffer.
I’ve used 2 or 3 audio programs in my lifetime.
I’ve never experienced so much negative change.

So I am asking at this point:
Will future versions maybe not be able to do Macros anymore
but you get a fancy Autotune as an exchange.

There was a version where simple Macros were not possible.
I know that writing this stuff is hard and a lot of team effort is made.

But I feel less like a user and more like a Beta Tester.
Is there an argument to be made to downgrade stuff that worked before?
Giving me reigns for stuff that I never asked?

As someone that uses Audacity exclusively for recording / editing (I use a full featured DAW for real-time processing), I sympathize. My workaround is to use Audacity 2.4.2 (the last of the 2.x series). Note that Audacity 3.x “AUP3” projects are not compatible with Audacity 2.x.

If you are on Windows, Foobar 2000 is very good (and free) for batch format conversion. (For Linux there is “Sound Converter”, and I expect there is something for macOS.)

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