Looking to find the limits of the latest RPi I decided to have a go at compiling Audacity. I am running on the 64 bit version of Ubuntu with the KDE desktop and it was generally reponsive enough to be worth a try. First I just used the standard source and tried to follow …/linux/config.txt .
This is OK up to a point and I got through the wxwidgets install and compile but for the very last install step which seems to be missing.
At this point I changed to Steve’s recent how to post and downloaded the audacity source from foss hub as he recommends. This went OK until the config script fell over with the message that a version of gcc which supported -msse was needed. It seem that the config.guess script returns a build type of aarch64-unknow-linux-gnu and although I tried to replace unknown with one or two of my own guesses by using the --build= option for config I couldn’t come up with anything that worked. Then I found this post
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/msse-flag-on-arm/48598/1
which reports a similar problem and suggests that --disable-sse could work and sure enough it did the trick. I was then able to build and install Audacity.
I haven’t tested it extensively but it seems very responsive and OK for general use. It loads in under 30 seconds. I am using a USB external audio interface ( RME Babyface) taking advantage of the PI 4 USB 3 sockets which provide plenty of power for it. There does seem to be a playback problem for project sample rates over 96KHz even though playing 192KHz files with this setting still works OK. I know nothing about the ALSA interface in Linux so as the CPU doesn’t seem to be overloaded there may be some improvements to be made by someone who knows what they are doing!
Finally I can’t resist commenting that the wxWidgets graphics on Ubuntu look much smarter than they do on windows. Gives an air of professionalism to Audacity.