Older versions of Audacity are available here: https://www.fosshub.com/Audacity-old.html
Thanks, but I am not a fan of going back in time, the point is, the app should be better each update, if this latest version is so bad, then the devs need to do an update to brick it, and replace it with an older version.
Audacity was acquired by Muse Group 2 years ago. Muse Group are progressing Audacity in a different direction, with an emphasis on “real-time” processing and on-line functionality rather than the previous focus on “destructive” processing as a stand-alone Desktop app. In other words, Audacity is transitioning from being an off-line recorder and editor to more of a “DAW”.
While this change of direction is welcomed by many Audacity users, it doesn’t suit everyone. Personally I have no need of another DAW as I already have Ardour and Reaper (both are excellent DAWs). I just need a good off-line audio editor, so I use (a slightly modified version of) Audacity 2.4.2. I don’t personally see that using Audacity 2.4.2 is a “step backwards” - just not moving forward (other than my own modifications) beyond the 2.x series.
In the world of mobile phone software video editing, there is very little of quality, and right now, Lumafusion is looking like a great up n coming player, it suffers from a major flaw, that is not being able to zoom into the waveform, beyond 1/60th of 1 second, or 1 frame, for audio editing lumafusion in non viable, they are aware of this issue, related to avfoundation.
Audacity being open source and with the plug in, I suggested to Lumafusion/lumatouch that they co lab with Audacity to create a paid plug in for Lumnafusion, I tried using Audacity 3.2 on my 2022 Macbook Air M1, and it does not work, period, it is not a viable functional app at this point… It is beyond broken…
The best open is to brick version 3,2 like Samsung did a year or 3 back, with the Note, issued an update that bricked the phone, brick 3.2, and replace it with an older functional version, or option 2… Give me the ability within 3.2 to choose what version I want to try within the preference window…
So far no one has explained why the playhead [thin vertical line] is so slow, to move 1 pixel takes exactly 1 second… that is just broken, and what went so wrong with v3,2???
I’m not saying that Audacity is blameless, but I think it’s only fair to place some of the blame on Apple. When they brought out the “M” / “silicon” chips, they broke compatibility with a huge amount of existing software for Mac. Some of the existing software would continue to work if the owner of the Mac installed “Rosetta 2”, but still that seems to be a workaround for a problem of Apple’s making. Apple have never had much interest in retaining compatibility beyond a few years.
Um, it seems that Audacity 3.2–> is all about effects and not anything to do with Apple Mac support in terms of M1/M2 silicon, so much so it seems that even though I have installed the “silicon” version 3.2.2.0 of Audacity, there has not made a blind bit of difference to the speed, still slower than frozen maple syrup…
Question… is there ever going to be a speed increase in moving the playhead at faster than 1 pixel/second??
If you edit the plist as recommended in that thread Audacity will not launch on macOS 13.0.1 on an M1 Mac.
– Bill
For what it’s worth I’m not seeing the slow cursor movement using Audacity 3.2.2 (arm version) on a 2020 MacBook Air with M1 chip or a 2022 MacBook Air with M2 chip.
As far as I can tell from reading the forum, no-one else is having this severe slowdown of cursor movement. For me, the editing cursor is responsive to the arrow keys, movement of the playback cursor is reasonably smooth (not nearly as bad as when it was first reported on the high-dpi displays), and selection in the audio waveform is snappy.
So perhaps the question should be: “what is it about your installation that is causing the problem?”
– Bill
I’m not sure what you mean by “1 sample per second”. Could you describe exactly what you are doing, what you expect to happen, and what actually happens?
In Audacity, when stopped, the left-arrow and right-arrow keys move the editing cursor 1 pixel left or right, so the amount of time it moves is dependent on the zoom level. When Audacity is playing, the arrow keys move the playback cursor the amount specified in Preferences > Playback, Seek Time when playing.
– Bill
When pressing the right cursor key, I expect the playhead to move right faster than 1 pixel per second…It would be great if this could be changed in ratio to the zoom level, or in preferences… but right now 1pixel/second is way to slow, to move 10 pixels right takes 10 full real life seconds… How can this be acceptable in 2022??
I was hoping that pressing a “modifying” key, it would gain a bit of speed, from 1px/sec to more than 1px/sec… Sadly no one thought that time was important…
Why are there so many features in Audacity built in? Why not strip Audacity 3.3 down to bare bones, it only does 1 thing, faster scrolling and highlighting, and any other tasks, ANY other “feature” is optional through PLUG IN install??? To me this makes every sense, as it reduces the workload of the app, it then makes diagnosis of issues fast, and problem solving reliable… But what do I know???
"Does this help? https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/audacity-lagging-on-new-imac-solved/58175/1
Not in any way… Changed the software from the Intel/M1 install to the M1 install DMG, still slower than frozen nutella… All I need is a speedy playhead controlled by the cursor, just how hard can this be for a 64bit app in 2022… We had better apps in the late 80’s…
FYI - you’ll get more developer exposure to your situation if you create an issue report here: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues
I still don’t understand what you’re doing. Are you moving the cursor while stopped, or while playing?
Are you saying that you press the right-arrow key while stopped and it takes one second for the cursor to react and move? If so, I’m not seeing that delay. With the key repeat rate set to maximum in System Settings I can press and hold the right-arrow key and the cursor moves with every key repeat. Sometimes the refresh of the cursor in the waveform will lag a bit but the indicator in the Timeline always keeps up.
When moving the editing cursor while stopped the movement is 1 pixel per keypress so the amount of time moved with each keypress varies with the zoom level. Look at the Time Toolbar while moving the editing cursor with the arrow keys.
If you are using the arrow keys to “seek” while playing, the amount to time the cursor moves with each keypress is set in Playback Preferences.
– Bill
Hi Bill,
Ok, it is like this, I want to use audacity without a mouse, only use short cut keys and the 4 cursor keys…
What I expect to happen with the LEFT and RIGHT cursor keys is that it moves with some sort of speed, not 1px per second, which is extremely slow, this speed does not change regardless of what setting I have in preference of Audacity…This is very annoying and does not help one bit with audio editing with any speed, which is required in a busy newsroom…
I am using the cursor keys whilst stopped, in trying to find the in and out points…
For me the perfect setup would be…
1 Cursor Left and Right, move faster than 1 px/sec,
2 If I press Shift+Cursor Left or Right, it moves according to the speed I set in Preferences
3 Holding Control |+ Cursor Left or Right, Highlights the section
4 Delete, deletes the section highlighted
5 Cursor Up = Zoom Out
6 Cursor Down= zooms in
7 I key-set in point, if not highlighting…
8-O key-set out point, if not highlighting…
9 E- export media to location set in preference
10- S-Silence if in out points or highlight set.
11 M-marker, this could be exported as a marker so that if I have a bunch of markers set, I could export the markers and import the ranges between markers, not sure how this would work, but the idea in my head is that I have a bunch of clips that are able to be imported as stand alone clips, or merged…work in progress on this idea
12… This is the most important 3 keys in all of technology… J K L
J slow-faster-- faster still—faster even more…in reverse
K- STOP
L slow-faster–faster still—faster even more
Y Key-Stereo to Mono, Control Y mono to Stereo…
The reason I want to use the keyboard and trackpad instead of the mouse is the USB-C ports on the 2020 Macbook air, there are only 2, and it is annoying to have to use adapters, and the 2 USB-C ports are too close and on the the same side, 2x left, 2x right, but no Apple decided 2x left is more than enough ports for everyone…grrrh…annoying!!!
The speed of the playhead should be set in preference, maybe on a sliding scale widget, this is independent of the scale of the timeline, holding down a “modifying” key 10x faster, again this multiplier could be set in preference, “speed multiply” from 2x to 50x a sliding scale…
But the biggest problem with Audacity is that the devs are taking the product which they don’t own, down a rabbit hole of development they have no right to do, without consultation of the community, and by community, every user as a right to contribute…Good or bad, troll or not… That is open source, if this was a private company, fair do, you can do as you please…
Plans for future development shared, a poll taken, and then the results shared, and further discussed, as to what or where, or what is important now and what is planned for later… Just to force a development is not what open source means…
Testing on W10 with 3.2.3 and the latest alpha test builds I Gave for 3.3.0
when I use the left/right keyboard arrows to move the cursor it travels across my entire default size window in approximately 10 seconds. And this is regardless of the zoom level.
I do note that if I switch to full screen (I have a large 17 inch laptop) it is slower, but still workable.
a) if I make the Audacity window wider than default then it also goes slower
b) if I make the Audacity window narrower then the cursor moves ate the same properly workable speed then the cursor moves at the same speed as when the window is default size.
Which I find rather odd - and unexplainable.
I will try to find some time to log this discrepancy on Muse’s GitHub issues log - but first I will need to do similar testing on my Macbook too.
Peter.
2020 Macbook Air, 8 GB RAM, Audacity is non functional, that is the 323 version, it simply does not work, it should be scrapped, version 331 should be just waveforms, with zero ability to do anything, only zoom in/out and move the playhead at a speed way faster than 1px/second…
Any effect other than deleting ranges, is a PLUG IN… How hard can this be, the problem is the DEV team think and believe they own the software, and are doing what they want, 100% truly believe it is a private product for their own enjoyment as they are DEVELOPERS, users be screwed…
Who gave the DEV the right to take the app on this path of development, to the point it does not work…
2nd They hid the M1 version, do nothing to explain may be there might be a problem but we don’t care, we use Linux… I as an owner of an Apple product made the mistake of buying that Apple product…
I am open to sharing my screen, to “teams” sharing, live video chatting, and being part of discussions, as I see it, right now Audacity is US [dev] vs the users, 2 parties with diverging interests…
If you want me to post on Github, then create a form that I fill in, that posts to Github, don’t force users to join just to make a post, that is way too much and not required… Or the Dev/forum whatwhat here, who is on Github posts on behalf of users… Me on Github, one more annoyance I just don’t need…
Whenever I read those words, I immediately realise that I’m reading the words of someone that has never programmed anything.
I mean to understand the concept of Audacity is only a tool for deleting unwanted audio, any other effects are plug in effects installed by the user as and when they need, to include just makes the app non functional… That was the original idea behind, then it went all stupid with effects… Delete the effects, go back to basics…
Just revert to 2.4.2 (or 3.0.0 if you want a unitary project database).
Neither of those versions has the new fancy stuff like real-time effects stack, or smart clips that bloat and slow-down projects.
Peter.