Advice on which version to use

[mrnomas]

I'm running XP SP3 with an M-Audio Fast Track Pro sound card and Audacity 1.3.5. I've used this combination for quite some time to record podcasts and the like. It's been great overall. However, this week when I recorded my podcast, my audio became randomly garbled and robotic. You could understand what was being said but it sounded horrible an grating. The garbling would cut in and out very randomly. I'm reinstalling my m-audio drivers but I thought I might switch to a different version of Audacity if this is a known (if rare) issue. Should I switch to 1.3.9 or one of the other versions? The last time I upgraded (not sure to what version) I found that Audacity was extremely unstable with my gear and tended to shut down. Any advice or suggestions would be helpful.

[steve]

For stability, try the latest (alpha) version - this contains bug fixes that are not in the current release version.
Test it thoroughly before doing any important recording.
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... s_Binaries

this week when I recorded my podcast, my audio became randomly garbled and robotic.

There are many reasons this could be happening but it is most likely because your computer is not running as efficiently as before. Make sure that you still have plenty of free drive space. Defrag your drive if you've not done so recently, and run a full virus/malware scan.