release-3.7.0 has been split off master, so We’re switching the Audacity master branch to 4.0.0 development now. This means the following:
All future 3.x releases will be based on release-3.x.x, not master anymore.
There will be massive changes in both tooling and dependencies (namely, Qt6 is going to happen).
There will be massive changes in the source code. Namely, contents of the au4/ directory will be put into /, while the current src/ will be moved into au3/. Not all functionality of it has been duplicated into au4/ yet, but that will happen gradually. Audacity 4 will be, some UI/UX changes notwithstanding, almost identical to the last 3.x release we put out.
As a result, there will happen a bit of cleanup:
All pull requests which target master will be closed as they’d run into monster conflicts.
All issues which are no longer applicable to Audacity 4 will be closed. Some classes of bugs which have no chance of having the same cause in Audacity 4 (especially regarding build systems and UI) may be blanket-closed, but most will be tested against Audacity4 and only closed once a) the feature to be tested exists there and b) the bug no longer is reproducible.
Bugs assigned to the 3.7 milestone will remain open (regardless of whether or not they’re fixed in Audacity 4), and may be fixed in upcoming Audacity 3.7.x patch releases. If you want to contribute on the last legs of Audacity 3, this is your final chance
We’ll publish a blogpost with more details regarding roadmap, timeline and just Audacity 4 stuff very soon. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to post them below.
Also, I’ll be updating this thread with more information regarding development. If you’re logged in, click the bell on the right to get notified.
What are the goals for 4? Hopefully a lot of simplification in both code and UI and solid reliability now given the chance to clean up. Is a big deal though.
After syncing master and attempting to build on Windows, it appears that QT is now required. Is that new for 4.0.0? I assume so, because I have not needed QT previously.
Edit: Answering my own question, in the second bullet of the announcement I see that Qt6 will be a requirement.
Thanks for these updated instructions. I’ve been trying to build with the latest Qt, 6.8.0, and haven’t been having much luck. Your instructions here list Qt 6.2.4. Seems that the oldest version that the Qt open source online installer will install is 6.5.3. I’ll check the updated build instructions for further info.
I now have 4.0.0 building with Visual Studio. However, although the code builds with Visual Studio, it is not debuggable by Visual Studio without some manual changes. First, the properties of the ALL_BUILD target need to be edited to change the Output Directory and the Target Name, in order to point VS to the audacity.exe target. Then, all of the .DLL files below the _deps directory need to be copied to this same target directory.
With the latest build changes I see some improvement in building 4.0.0 with Visual Studio but it still fails during a custom build process near the end. The custom build process attempts to create “C:\Program Files(x86)/audacity/bin” and copy the executable there, but neither of those is possible unless you are running with elevated admin privileges. I, and I suspect most people, do not run Visual Studio as an elevated process.