I’ve been using Audacity 4 for a few days and just would like to give my feedback of issues I’ve found. These may have been said before so I apologize but anything helps.
The job I work at uses Audacity so we’re using it all the time. It does exceptionally well at cleaning audio and Audacity 4 is still great to do so, but there are some bugs and other oddities I’ve found by using it.
If I find more bugs I will make new topics. These bugs may also not be bugs and I just haven’t found the right thing, I am still learning Audacity 4 after all but maybe my incompetence might help the team understand a better way to make features more intuitive.
Keybinds Reset (found on Windows 11)
Occasionally when using Audacity 4, my keybinds would randomly reset themselves. I have a particular set of keybinds to make workflow faster so this becomes an annoyance. They seem to reset also when I close Audacity 4. I can’t find an “apply” button so I always press “ok” in the shortcuts tab, but for a brief period of time the keybinds I set work normally, so I’m not sure what’s happening.
Tracks that are not Solo’d will play a fraction of audio before muting (Found on Windows 10)
Little hard to explain, but when I solo a track and playback, the other tracks will play a millisecond of audio before realizing “hey, I’m not currently in Solo!” then mute themselves. For example, I have 2 tracks with 2 different voices talking at the same time. If I solo one track then play, I can hear both voices for a fraction of time. It’s a little jarring when this happens.
Meter of the Track flashes when playing audio (Found on Windows 10)
Sometimes when listening back, the meter on the left side of the track will flash. Seems to just be a visual bug.
Show Ruler/Waveform Zoom in keybind (Request)
In Audacity 3, you could hold CTRL and scroll on the ruler of a track to increase the waveform size visually. This was very helpful for making sure you’re not cutting the tail end of audio/voices. This feature still exists but now its hidden through 2 menu layers. It’d be nice to just have a keybind again.
Middle Mouse scroll (Request)
This one is probably a future feature I’m sure, but Middle mouse scroll in Audacity 3 was a godsent.
Export Multiple Files (Request)
Again, probably in the works.
There is a bug in the new Audacity 4 that when you select a portion of the track to be edited while audio is playing and then press stop, that the program jumps back to the last time you saved instead of just stopping the playback. This did not happen with the old audacity. You could select while the audio is playing, press stop and then delete/edit wherever you are. Normally I save with each edit and depending on how many or how few edits I make, that can be like 10 minutes ago. So now I have to go back and find where I was when I pressed the stop button and then place my cursor there, save and then do the edit and then save again.
Also, is it possible to get the left and right scroll arrow buttons back so that allow use to click the sideways scroll instead of having to use the sideways scroll bar. The scroll bar is pretty much the same color as the editing window so it’s not super noticable to need to look for every time. If the arrows are there, users know the arrows are always in those spots regardless of where the bar might be. This is especially helpful when editing on large monitors.
I’ll add a few bugs to your list, though I can’t determine exactly what conditions prompt most of them so they’re difficult to reproduce:
Split tool occasionally stops working. It shows the usual selection caret instead of the scissor cursor and does nothing on click. CTRL-I still works. Closing and reopening the project solves the problem. I can’t determine what exactly causes this to happen and can’t reproduce it on cue.
In one particular project, using the fade out effect causes a “Audacity failed to write to a file. Perhaps F: is not writable or the disk is full.” From that point on, it becomes impossible to save the project, as I keep getting that same modal. (The F: drive in question is, incidentally, not at all full, and it won’t let me save to a different drive either.) Closing and reopening the project again fixes this, and so far it’s reliably been able to recover the project to the point right before I applied the fade. Starting a fresh project and using the fade out effect doesn’t cause this, and I can’t seem to set up a demo file in such a way that it recurs, so I recognize that this is a fairly unhelpful bug report.
A purely visual bug that is at least reproduceable: if you have two tracks, set the second track to Solo, and then delete that solo track, the clips for track 1 will still be colored as if they’re muted, though they will play. Muting and unmuting the track fixes this.
Finally, performance is a serious issue, in a way that simply wasn’t true for v3. I’m working on a project with about an hour’s worth of recorded audio - which is not that much! - split into short clips, and moving clips around is painfully slow. And if I dare to hit undo after moving a clip, it’ll be a solid 30+ seconds before it responds.
I was really excited for v4, and I can’t tell you how much I wanted to love it. And the ability to select multiple clips at once is a huge quality-of-life improvement. But if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have begun this current big project in v4, and I wouldn’t recommend v4 to a friend. It just feels… undercooked. Many of the interface changes from v3, like space not playing the current selection or middle mouse drag not scrolling sideways, seem arbitrary - which is bizarre, because I follow Tantacrul and I know how much thought and effort the team put into this update. And the performance issues are rapidly becoming quite frustrating - again, this is not a huge project.
Change Tempo is also missing which was an extremely useful tool for our business. This is probably the most critical tool as I am currently editing through our audio. Using Audacity 4 will not be feasible unfortunately if this doesn’t exist.
The playhead bug is horrifyingly unacceptable. I’ve gone back to edit in A3 as a result.
I’ve also noticed that I can’t import a video and export the sound from A4, which also renders it unusable for me. I do this all the time to solve audio problems on video, or to create audio versions of videos, and now it’s just… gone. Pretty major omission, if it’s not intentional.