1.3.13 RC1 won't run on Win 2k

[Gale Andrews]

AlanHK, thanks for the report. I'm not very happy that videohelp are apparently promoting 1.3.13 rc1 as if it were a release without explaining what "rc" means (release candidate) and then linking direct to Googlecode. So I have asked them to consider if they can make this clearer. That said, it least it has found an issue.

Thanks also, Edgar for doing some research. I'm not really an authority on dll's, however I would read it that GetModuleHandleExW and its ANSI equivalent GetModuleHandleExA are not supported on Windows 2000, rather than Windows 2000 doesn't support Unicode. The thing we need to find out is why that error is now occurring. Certainly the aim is that Unicode Releases of Audacity should support Windows 2000 and later.

You could try the ANSI 1.3.13 rc1 for sure, though of course that won't give you Unicode support. It might work purely because it is built on Visual Studio 2005 rather than 2008.

Can you also try
http://www.gaclrecords.org.uk/audacity- ... -alpha.zip

which is built on Visual Studio 2008 but on a different machine than the one the Unicode rc1 is built on? That should identify if there is some machine dependency involved somehow.

I'll see if Leland can come and take a look too.



Gale

[Gale Andrews]

Leland's looking into why this error appeared since 1.3.12 and how we can fix it.



Gale

[AlanHK]

Just got audacity-win-unicode-1.3.13rc2.zip and it runs on Win2k.

And Videohelp has at least now put up a warning that the RCs may be buggy and links also to 1.3.12.

[Gale Andrews]

Just got audacity-win-unicode-1.3.13rc2.zip and it runs on Win2k.

Thanks for confirming. This same issue meant that the ANSI 1.3.13 rc1 for Windows 98/ME would not run on those systems. Also that Win 98/ME build has further issues preventing an rc2 for it thus far. Hopefully those will be fixed for rc3.

And Videohelp has at least now put up a warning that the RCs may be buggy and links also to 1.3.12.

Thanks. Though their "Download the 1.13.12 Beta for latest stable release" is something of a contradiction in terms (in theory if not practice).



Gale

[AlanHK]

Though their "Download the 1.13.12 Beta for latest stable release" is something of a contradiction in terms (in theory if not practice).

On this point I think that they're right. After all these years, continuing to call 1.3 a "beta" is pretty silly, and it leads to people avoiding it unnecessarily.

Every time I recommend Audacity to someone I have to go into detail about how they should make sure to get the "1.3 beta" despite its name.

[Gale Andrews]

continuing to call 1.3 a "beta" is pretty silly,

There was an (IMO extremely weak) argument that 1.3.12 should have been 2.0. 1.3.13 is very much closer. A lot depends how 1.3.13 tests for recording/playback device issues on Windows, and if we can fix the data loss bugs for people who use Audacity projects.


Gale

[AlanHK]

There was an (IMO extremely weak) argument that 1.3.12 should have been 2.0. 1.3.13 is very much closer. A lot depends how 1.3.13 tests for recording/playback device issues on Windows, and if we can fix the data loss bugs for people who use Audacity projects.

That's a different issue to whether it's a beta or not.

I always tell people to "get the latest beta release", something I would never do for software where "beta' means what it normally does.
But now if I do that people may get RCs.

It seems perverse to keep calling something a beta after it's been used for years, and had several updates itself.

[steve]

I can see your point AlanHK, and in part I agree. I think the problem is that Audacity 1.3 has been "in beta" for far too long. There should have been a new "stable" release years ago (possibly around the time of Audacity 1.3.4) but there wasn't. I think that it's quite understandable that developers generally prefer to work on bright new sparkly features (which we have all benefited from) rather than going through old code smoothing off the rough edges to bring it up to "main release" standard. I can also understand the argument that there are too many bugs and usability issues to call Audacity 1.3.12 a "stable" release (though from my own experience it is more stable than some other "stable release" software).

There was a really big push last year to iron out the show stoppers. This resulted in Audacity 1.3.12, which in my opinion is the best Audacity to date. It would have been great if that version could have been released as "the new, non-beta release", but unfortunately there were still some unresolved issues that were too serious to get away with in a "stable" version. Many of these issues have been fixed over the last year so we are now much closer to the long overdue non-beta Audacity 2.0.

Hopefully, after the release of Audacity 2.0, the gap between beta and main release versions will not be allowed to grow so big. I think it would be good to see main releases coming out annually, with a couple of beta releases (for real world testing) between main releases.