I’m new to this forum but have been using Audacity for my podcast for about 4 years. It’s a great program and it’s been very helpful to me. I’ve been using version 2.4.2 running on a Windows 10 Pro desktop computer. AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight-Core Processor and 16GB RAM. My PC is several years old now. Like me it is no longer young. haha. I have AKG microphone and Focusrite scarlett audio interface.
Up until now, I haven’t thought about updating Audacity. My question is: should I do it? If I do, what benefits or problems might I encounter with the new version? Should I go for the latest version, 3.7.1, or is that too big a jump? Will there be a bigger learning curve?
Here are my thoughts on your question. I’m fairly sure that at least two of the forum moderators still use 2.4.2 and that ought to tell you something. The way projects are stored changed in version 3.x from a descriptor file and matching folder of audio snippets to a single project file. The single file is easier to keep track of. However, if you upgrade to 3.x and convert your current projects to the new format, you cannot open them again in 2.4.2 if you decided to revert. You would have to export as WAV and reimport them into the older version.
I tried most versions of 3.x and my experience was that 3.3.3 was pretty reliable and solid and the current version 3.7.1 is decent too. Everything in between I would avoid. Later versions of Audacity have newer/different features which some people like and some don’t. I think the main point to bear in mind is how the change of project format will affect you and plan for it.
Good luck whatever you decide.
Mark B
It doesn’t matter what way you slice it, if Audacity’s UI lags on any system past 2015, something is very wrong. This is what is wrong. Also I don’t use whatever feature you’re on about. Didn’t even know it existed. The solution is to put the UI on a separate thread for one, and then fix whatever is making the UI use one entire core for no reason. This should be close to the top of any priority list… this should have been done a decade ago… does anyone even prioritize anymore? That’s rhetorical, of course they don’t, at least not correctly. Being essentially free open source isn’t an excuse anymore, too many people use this thing for this crap to get put off for so damn long. It is very difficult to have any kind of faith or trust in the open source community when such obvious things just never get dealt with. Forget if everyone is a volunteer- does anyone have common sense!? Again, rhetorical.
If you’re using Audacity 3.1, or higher, you’re using non-destructive editing,
whether you like it or not: you can’t turn it off … https://youtu.be/HpA138b-J9s?&t=67
Then I can’t imagine the devs would be THAT stupid, to introduce something that you can’t even turn off that lags the entire program, so that’s probably not the problem I’m talking about. I was told somewhere on Github that the UI that is to blame.
