difference between 1.2 and 1.3

[KatieM]

Wat is the difference between versions 1.2 and 1.3?

[kozikowski]

The short answer is 1.3 has been designed around modern operating systems and is much more likely to get you through a show without crashing and damage. I have a newer Mac that won't launch Audacity 1.2 at all.

The much longer version is better tools and more of them. The Noise Reduction in Audacity 1.3, for example, actually does useful work, unlike the one in 1.2, which in my opinion is useless.

Koz

[steve]

All development work on the 1.2.x series ended several years ago. It can still be useful for people with really ancient machines running Win 98.

All development work since then has been on the 1.3.x series. It still retains the simple user interface, but has much better tools under the bonnet. It'll run well on anything from Win XP onwards (though bear in mind that Windows computers are not really designed for audio production, so for best results you may need to do a bit of tweaking of your system - a good place to start is to make sure that you have lots of free disk space (all audio work uses a lot of disk space) and defragment your hard drive. If you have a lot of programs running in the background, work out which ones don't need to be running. Lots of tips here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Recording_Tips

Having said that, lots of people find that they can do everything that they need without any tweaking at all - it just depends on how much you want to do and how well your computer is currently running.