Hello. I am going back to some older version of Audacity from the recently downloaded 3.7.3, and I would like you to know my reasons.
One: thank you very much for demanding that I upgrade my browser simply to post a topic on the software’s forum. There is a million and one possibility for a forum engine, yet this team selects a corporate one that feels like something out of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” I beg your forgiveness, but I am not goint to abandon the version of the browser I find convenient, relatively unintrusive and still somewhat user-friendly just to be able to complain here. What a great idea to make everyone suck the corporate dick by forcing them to play this Discourse game (and how ironic the name “Discourse,” when it suppresses and drives out users). If I go back to a more satisfactory version of Audacity, I won’t have to come here, so this problem will be solved. Audacity already does everything a sound editor should do, there is no need to keep improving it to the state of a kitchen combine (Anathema! Yes, people, at some point in the past you simply should have stopped and gone on to do something else with your lives instead of making the program worse.)
Two: the ultra-boring, depressing interface of the new Audacity. Even the name pop-up when starting it is written in a blander, duller script than before. Is that Times New Roman? It feels like it. The interface buttons are smaller than before, they look cheaper and bleaker (bleaker even than they were, bleak like Churchill-age Britain in flanel overalls), sketchier, without solidity. They feel like a gray wireframe that I am pushing around a tabletop. It so happened that I was using a very, very old version until recently (and satisfactory on most fronts, which shows how long ago you should have stopped tinkering with it), and while its interface was also bleak, there was even a little green in it. Audacity was never a joy to use, but now it is perversely unpleasant. And its effects windows are much smaller. Why make them so small? That crowds my carpal tunnel syndrome, and making small adjustments in, say, pitch or speed is less intuitive.
Three: it has been made difficult and time-consuming to join audio clips. I used to be able to paste a stretch into a track, click on the borderline and presto, it was done. Now I have to drag to select both clips, go to Edit, to the next pop-out option there and finally apply “Join Audio.” What is the idea? It was too simple?
Four: it is now impossible to click in the beginning of the track. I just can’t get my cursor there. I end up next to the beginning and must then use the keyboard to slide the cursor left.
Five: the pips when zooming in are tiny. They used to be solid, handy, dark round balls that I could easily manhandle, but now they are tiny gray dots on a gray line.
Six: the old Audacity was smart when it came to the Bass/Treble effect. It keps the window on when this effect was applied. Apparently the developers then realized that, whether towards adding bass or towards adding treble, this effect would often be applied several times in a row. Other effect windows, such as Amplify, would close after one application, but Bass/Treble would stay on and I could preview the next application of it quickly. Now this window closes like all others, and if I have to make a staggered adjustment in three steps, listening to how it goes, I must open it three times.
These annoyances come up repeatedly, and they are enough to turn me off. In some other other respects this newer version is superior. For example, I greatly appreciate the “Export audio” window now, where I can choose whether to save the whole file or only the selection and point out the destination folder, all in one place. This is a real time-saver. I don’t see Audacity making automatic backups in the destination folder when overwriting files, a feature that is useful more often that not, but maybe that option is in the settings somewhere. All in all, though, the program has become unsightly and definitely unfriendly in a few important regards.
