Audacity Forum

Has development of Audacity stopped? It has been some time since the last beta.

Thanks

DrT

DrTeeth wrote:Has development of Audacity stopped? It has been some time since the last beta.

As of a few hours ago Audacity is in "commit freeze" to prepare a "release candidate" for the next beta:
http://audacity.238276.n2.nabble.com/no ... 09648.html
The timeframe for rc1 availability is 23:59 UTC on March 28--hopefully, assuming no insurmountable problems in the release process (which is quite complex as Audacity supports different platforms and everything must be tested before release).

That's good news, thanks.

DrT

Any chance of someone updating the roadmap to give us an idea of when the plans for 1.4 release are? I gotta be honest, I love Audacity and love recommending it, but it's always a hard sell to get someone to try an application that has been in beta for years! People never really trust betas.

1.3.13 should be out soon (possibly this week) as the latest Beta - the latest 1.3.13 Alphas have proved pretty stable and mainly bug-free. 1.3.12 and 1.3.13 are both a vast improvement over the now ancient 1.2.6.

There will be no 1.4 - the team is going to make 2.0 the next formal release as there are a lot of functionality changes and improvements over the 1.2.x series. The alphas are approaching RC (Release Candidate) status, there are a few known Prority 2 (P2) bugs that the development team want to fix prior to releasing 2.0. But with a following wind I'd hope to see 2.0 released later this year.

WC

solanus wrote:Any chance of someone updating the roadmap to give us an idea of when the plans for 1.4 release are? I gotta be honest, I love Audacity and love recommending it, but it's always a hard sell to get someone to try an application that has been in beta for years! People never really trust betas.

It's not being in beta for yours that does it for me, it is the lack of releases. In fact, before I buy any software, I check the release dates to see if development has stalled.

DrT

DrTeeth wrote:It's not being in beta for yours that does it for me, it is the lack of releases. In fact, before I buy any software, I check the release dates to see if development has stalled.

You can get an idea of recent Audacity development activity here: http://code.google.com/p/audacity/updates/list

Let me qualify my statement - I'm a huge advocate of Open Source applications. I believe Open Source is for everyone, not just experienced users, developers, and people "in the know". Most people do not have a clue about browsing Google Code, or the nuances of a beta version that lasts for years, they just see it as "not quite finished" and give it a decide it's not worth the risk.
At least when the Roadmap was more maintained, it was an accessible plan that was clear and understandable. It doesn't have to be super detailed, it just needs to give the average Joe or Jane the impression that there is an end-goal.

I agree that it's been a long time since the last release (about a year) and we all very much look forward to the release of Audacity 2. Sometimes there can be a lot of work go into a project with little to show for it in the short term.