deceasedlavy wrote:my editor will not have to murder me after all.
I'm very pleased about that.
A couple of notes about Audacity 1.3.x
This is the "beta" (testing and development) line, so some versions are not very stable.
I used 1.3.4 on Windows XP for a long time (still got it on one machine) and it is rock solid.
1.3.7 on the other hand was forever falling over.
1.3.9 - very stable on my Linux machine as long as I did not delete label tracks (which caused it to crash)
1.3.10 (alpha) - Rock solid. The most stable version I've used.
Crash recovery in Audacity 1.3.x is very much better than in any 1.2 version. If Audacity 1.3 crashes it has a high success rate of recovering the project automatically when next opened (though you will loose the "Undo History" )
I definitely recommend trying the most up-to-date version of Audacity 1.3.x, but test it thoroughly before doing any important projects so that you can discover if there are any quirks on your hardware. As always, make backups as you go (I understand that on this occasion you did not have that opportunity). Probably the safest form of backup for a recording is to Export as a WAV file as soon as the recording is complete. I also regularly save the project, but using "Save As..." so that I get a series of saved projects (newproject01, newproject02, newproject03, ...). This uses a lot of disk space, but once the project is complete and Exported, burned to CD, or whatever, I can then delete all of the old project versions.
Audacity is now getting very close to releasing the new (Audacity 2.0) stable version, and no new features are being added (just bug fixes).
All known current issues are listed here:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... _Checklist
The important ones are the "P2" issues which usually mean that they only affect a few users, or are non-fatal (there are currently no known P1 issues). If you are doing important production work, you need to know if any of these issues will affect you - so it is advisable to test thoroughly.
Of course, the overall stability of your computer is also extremely important. It does not matter how stable Audacity is if there are other stability issues with the computer, so important work should always be done on a clean, well maintained machine, and not the one that the kids play on.