I'll say first that I've used Audacity ever since I've had a PC in the first place; I see no reason to use anything else.
That said, I wanted to take a moment and applaud the piece of software that can record 44100/16 audio at full speed on a computer almost of legal drinking age here in the US. I needed a good way to record MIDI music rendered on a Sound Blaster AWE32-CT3990 (the most amazing full-length sound card you'll ever see) - my mic jack wouldn't cut it because of a) mass amounts of noise, and b) the fact that the output on this card has so much amplification that it clips into oblivion. Well, I stuck the oldest legacy build of Audacity I could find onto this system - it runs a Pentium/MMX at 166Mhz with 64MB of memory and a 4MB S3 Virge video card; the poor thing could barely open Audacity in the first place, and there was so much input lag that a button would react five seconds after you pressed it.
I went ahead and turned it back to 16-bit and tried recording the stereo mix; I think the stuttering was so bad that it missed more of the music than it recorded. The system just couldn't keep up. Well, I realized that I could render into the memory instead of using the blazing speed of a 1.2GB hard disk... after doing that, and cranking the recording buffer up several fold, I ended up with this:
http://www.mediafire.com/listen/ukc8nb4 ... astway.wav
...That's coming from a system that cannot drive a monitor past 1280x1024; make that 800x600 if you want 24-bit color. Painfully slow as it may have been (the window would only refresh itself once every ten seconds or so when recording), Audacity chugged through... hell, even Win98 was beat to death and needed restarted after that. Old systems don't like being run out of memory when you forget to stop recording to it... fun things happen.
I was amazed at how well it turned out... if you've ever felt the need to hear EXACTLY what "Goin' the Fast Way Down" from Rise of the Triad sounds like on an AWE32, there you go.The point of this whole post is this: Even on a system from 20 years ago, Audacity is just as useful as it ever was. For the sake of people like myself, don't try to save yourselves a few megs of storage by getting rid of the Legacy download section... it still sees good use. And thanks for the amazing piece of software - that's my feedback for the day.