All Ears
Audacity, everyone’s favorite open-source audio manipulator, matures into version 2.0.4. And with it come a bevy of changes that you are sure to exploit upon installation. Here is a list of the changes and improvements from the release notes.
- New “Reverb” effect to replace GVerb, based on the original “Freeverb”.
- New View > Go to Selection Start and Go to Selection End commands.
- New Tracks > Align End to End command to append existing tracks to each other.
- Change Tempo now supports fractional BPM.
- Plot Spectrum now supports FFT sizes up to 65536.
- WAV files now support “Album Title”, “Track Number” and “Genre” LIST INFO tags and also support ID3 tags.
- Handle a bug in older iPods or some OS X applications that cause them to refuse AIFF files whose metadata contains an uneven number of characters,
- (Windows) Added support for “Windows WDM-KS” host which can provide very low latencies if you reduce “Audio to Buffer” in Recording Preferences.
- (Windows Vista and later) You can now record computer playback by choosing the new “Windows WASAPI” host in Device Toolbar then a “loopback” input.
- (Windows and Mac OS X): VST scanning dialog now replaced with a dialog for choosing which VST effects to load.
- (Linux) CTRL + ALT can now be used to smooth samples in Draw Tool.
- Modules Preferences replaced with a dialog on launch of Audacity enabling you to choose which modules to load.
Fractional BPM
The most interesting of these changes from our vantage point is fractional BPM. This feature allows users to increase or decrease BPM by a fraction of a beat. Justin Beiber’s new track just .2 BPM too fast for you at 120? Try 119.8!
Bug Fixes
Audacity 2.0.4 also brings with it several bug fixes.
- Keyboard Preferences: Shortcuts for Generators, Effects and Analyzers were not exported. All imported shortcut changes were discarded.
- Equalization curves were corrupted in Graphic EQ mode after switching to/from Draw Curves or after running the effect then reopening it.
- Change Pitch displayed corrupted values when reducing pitch or editing “from” Frequency. Detection was very inaccurate at high sample rates.
- Bass Boost no longer clips if the track contains 32-bit audio.
- Auto Duck was excessively slow on older machines.
- (Windows) Exported MP3 comments tags were not seen by Windows programs.
- (Windows and OS X) Audacity crashed if you used system quit before file import was complete.
- (Linux) Equalization crashed Audacity if the XML file was corrupted.
- (Linux) When configuring effect parameters in “Edit Chains”, “Preview” (not intended to be functional) caused a crash.
- (Linux) LICENSE.txt and README.txt were wrongly installed in /usr/local/share/doc instead of /usr/local/share/doc/audacity/ .
- Accessibility: ENTER did not toggle selectedness of a label track unless a label was selected.
- Numerous other interface fixes.
Source | Audacity
Via | IceWalkers