After several years of successful projects using Audacity (see https://craigbuhler.com/ ), my computer tech guru strongly urged me to migrate to Ableton. I’ve spent the past several weeks laboriously trying to accomplish tasks with Ableton which are simple to do on Audacity! That project finally self destructed in a way which could not be repaired, so I have returned to Audacity and am delighted to now be using the new version.
The one and only advantage I can see in Ableton is that it can quantize clips to the proper tempo. This makes it easy to copy and paste clips in new locations, so that they are pasted precisely on the correct beat. It also means that you can easily correlate a certain measure from your score with the proper location on the timeline. By contrast, Audacity tracks minutes:seconds, rather than measure numbers. While a click track can be produced and used for visual synchronization, this is a laborious and inexact process.
Would it be conceivable to add quantization to your fabulous Audacity program? Here is an article on quantization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_(music)#:~:text=In%20digital%20music%20processing%20technology%2C%20quantization%20is%20the,beats%20and%20on%20exact%20fractions%20of%20beats.%20%5B1%5D
There is currently work being done to add “bars and beats” as an option in the TimeLine (the time ruler).
Although Audacity does not yet have that, there’s a plug-in available that creates labels at bar / beat intervals. When moving clips, there’s a week “snapping” to help align audio clip edges with labels (or to line up with the edges of other clips). The plug-in is available here: Beat Per Minute labels