I’ve been using Audacity for a while, but very occasionally, so I didn’t notice that the 3.x update had changed project file formats, and never tried to open an older project until this week. When I did, I noticed that every time two segments of audio were spliced next to each other in the same channel, there was an odd graphical glitch where the segments appeared to overlap, and about 3 seconds of audio were ripple-deleted after the splice:
The yellow line (hovered with select tool) is the actual original splice, which does not appear to have any visual indicator when not selected, and the one to the left was originally unbroken audio. Both points highlight with select tool like normal, although the cursor turns into a ] when in that section, only toward the top of the channel. The missing audio is immediately after the original splice.
I’ve confirmed that this occurs at every splice point in multiple projects, although it appears not to affect all of them; some older projects have been spared, likely the ones I made on Windows before switching to Linux. Also, the audio length removed seems to vary from project to project, typically 3 seconds or less. Now that I know Audacity is converting these from aup to aup3, there must be some sort of error in the conversion process, but I can’t find anyone else reporting this online.
What could be going on here? Is there likely to be any way to fix it other than fiddling around, reimporting/rebuilding, or downgrading to 2.x? I could hypothetically get the files into Windows and do the conversion there, but that’s also a bit of a pain.
(I’m running Audacity 3.4.3 on Ubuntu 24.04 on an old garbage laptop. Audacity updates through KDE Discover, from the apt repository afaik, that’s why it’s behind the newest version, and I’d rather not change that unless I’m sure it’ll fix things.)
It is probably a bug in Audacity 3.4.3. I recall seeing a bug like this in an older version of Audacity (The current version is 3.7.1) but I don’t recall exactly which versions have this problem, or if it has been fixed. You could try the 3.7.1 version by downloading the AppImage version from the main Audacity website.
Thanks for responding!
Okayyyyy fineeeee I’ll install the newest version, I just wanted to avoid mixing up two installations and/or accidentally migrating to one that doesn’t auto-update. If the problem persists I’ll reply here again, but even then there doesn’t seem to be much else to recommend. I’m glad someone is aware of the issue at least and that it’s not specific to my machine, which would make it quite daunting to determine the cause.
Installing 3.7.1 was way easier than I expected, although now I have no idea where the two installations are and which one is in my start menu search. Oh well, I’ll figure it out.
Anyway, the bug does not appear to be fixed in that version; opening/converting the same project files seems to behave in exactly the same way.
Regardless, I really appreciate the suggestion and details you were able to provide.
Edit: I didn’t understand how AppImages work, and thought the file had disappeared when I launched it due to file manager weirdness. Clearly I had nothing to worry about, but I’d still prefer the apt version since I don’t have to find the file or set up a .desktop or anything.
The AppImage versions are created by the Audacity team - it is an automated process, so AppImages are available at the time of release.
deb, rpm, and other Linux packages are produced by other parties after a new version of Audacity has been released, so there is always a delay between a new Audacity release and it becoming available as a deb package.
