Hi all,
Finally got round to testing the latest 3.1.2
Actually bought a second hand laptop just for this, it’s a, HP ProBook 4710S
with a nice 16.7" screen, Win 7 (32 bit), Core 2 DUO 2.7 GHz CPU, 4 GB RAM and 320GB HDD
and ATI Radeon graphics.
All in all, not a bad machine (for it’s age) and only paid 50 bucks for it.
Amazing what can be found in a thrift shop,
I can see why it was sold for so cheap, no battery (no problem just run it on mains)
and has an awful soundMAX audio card buit-in.
Now at least have a PC to try new Audacity releases as they come out without fear of it trashing anything important.
Don’t have any other uses for a Windows computer…oh wait there is Solitaire.
Since 3.1.2 works on this machine, it will pretty much run on anything I guess.
Also loaded versions 2.3.1 and 2.4.2 to be able to compare any speed differences.
Happy to report that 3.1.2 runs no slower than previous versions and is just as responsive.
Tried various ny, vst and LADSPA plugins, all good with the exception of TAL filter vst,
the latest version crashes after a few minutes of loading TAL.
On the plus side, it did recover the audio files once I restarted.
After about an hour of use, I suspect maybe I closed 3.1.2 too quickly and it crashed.
The test project was un-recoverable, but here is an interesting thing, no waveforms were being displayed
yet when I pressed the spacebar, the audio started playing.
I then proceeded to solo each track, export it as wav and in that way, was able to recover all the tracks.
Maybe something that others can try if they have had a crash, at least you get the audio out.
Another thing I noticed, if I mute a track, then select that track and select “export selected audio”,
the latest version will crash and offer to send a crash report.
Other things I like about 3.1.2, the looping feature is nice, the time shift feature I’m still getting used to
so no comment on that as yet.
The multi-view is nice but unfortunately, the dB waveform display option is gone, same as in 2.4.2 but is there on 2.3.1
I use this feature a lot.
Perhaps it’s still there and I don’t know how to enable it.
UPDATE:
It was just a case of not reading the manual.
Steve posted below on how to select the dB scale.
Simply right click on the track’s vertical scale and select either dB or linear.
What I don’t like about the new version is the AUP3 format and how prone it is to crashing and potentially trashing a project.
In 2 days of testing, it crashed 3 times for several reasons.
The devs have done a good job in modernizing Audacity, but I will not be upgrading just yet as I feel that
Audacity and the database pgm (mySQL ??) used to store projects, are still too “disjointed” and I don’t feel it’s quite ready for “prime time”.
I certainly don’t have enough confidence yet to use it on a real project.
I must repeat that I only tried the 32 bit Windows (.zip) version as the OS on this machine is 32 bit.
I’m assuming the 64 bit will be much the same.
I also notice that the audio level error that I wrote about that exists in previous versions is still there.