A new forum for Audacity 3 feedback and reviews

This morning (March 17th 2021) saw the first jump of Audacity version number in 9 years.

The biggest change since Audacity 2.x is the new “.AUP3” project format. The old “pile of files” AUP format has reached it’s end of service. Projects in the old format can still be opened (provided that they are not damaged), but will now be saved in a single file project format. We hope this will prove to be much more reliable and easier to manage than the previous multi-part format.

I’ve been using pre-release versions of Audacity 3.0.0 for the past few months and I’m loving it. I hope your experience is just as positive.

Steve
Forum Admin

New versions are always welcome but we shouldn’t ever forget backwards compatibility. Personally I use W10 and vanilla LTS ubuntu where the new version will not arrive soon. I won’t be able to exchange work between both platforms.

I also dislike AUP format but I strongly believe that old AUP format save capabilities, at least as export, should have been kept to allow for backwards compatibility for those users, platforms or situations where update to version 3 is not available or allowed.

Sure. Audacity has retained pretty good backward compatibility for nearly a decade, but there comes a point when the cost of maintaining backward compatibility outweighs the benefits.
Old versions of Audacity are still available (free) for anyone that really needs them): Old Audacity versions download

Note that Audacity still supports import and export of 32-bit float WAV files, so audio can still be transferred completely losslessly between any version of Audacity of the last 20 years. It is only “projects” where compatibility with Audacity 2.x has been dropped.

Also, Audacity is open source, so it is perfectly acceptable for anyone that has the time and inclination to develop an AUP3 to AUP conversion app.

The new format has been designed with forward compatibility in mind, so all being well, backward compatibility will be retained for the next decade.

I was about to complain about the Generate>Rhythm Track not remembering its last setting when I updated to 2.4.2, but it seems I don’t have to with the update of 3.0.0.
I’ve been using Rhythm Track with Cowbell as my preferred beat sound for precise syncing before I updated to 2.4.2 or more of a bit earlier versions. I was annoyed that it kept resetting to the default Metronome tick and Number of Bars.
Thank you for making Audacity 3.0.0 remember that setting again!

No issues here with the new AUP3 so far, though I wish we’re provided the option to (losslessly) compress it by itself (i.e. not having to manually zip it by 3rd party), with also an option for some kind of recovery module at a cost of a bit of size increase (similar to WinRAR’s recovery module, 3% by default) in case the project file gets damaged along the way.

Overall though, thank you for having Audacity still up!

That was a bug that has now been fixed.


Pleased to hear it.
We have discovered a few issues since release, and the developers are busy fixing them so that we can release a bug-fix version asap. The main issues found so far are that Nyquist plug-ins fail on long tracks (workaround: process long tracks in sections of half an hour or so), and some problems on Japanese systems (workaround: set Audacity to a different language).


I’d suggest that you propose that in a new topic on this page: Adding Features - Audacity Forum
(I thinks that’s a good idea)

Recovery is built-in into Audacity.

See: Automatic Crash Recovery - Audacity Manual

I did a lot of QA testing of this on Win and Mac prior to 3.0.0 release - and we have had a couple of post-release user reports to say it works well.

Petre.