Audacity 4 rebuilds the application interface on Qt and introduces many new quality-of-life improvements, including a new clip-editing model. Most Audacity 3 workflows remain available, but some controls have moved or changed.
Editing clips
- Clips can be selected directly. Click a clip header to select it, or Shift-click to select multiple clips.
- Several clips can be edited together. Moving, trimming and time stretching apply to all selected clips.
- Clips can be grouped. Groups remain together when moved, copied, pasted or duplicated.
- Clips can be placed more freely. They can move between mono and stereo tracks. Moving a clip over another replaces the overlapped part instead of blocking the move.
- Splitting has a dedicated tool. Press or hold S, then click the waveform or clip header. Split, split-cut, split-delete, split at silences and split to a new track are also available as commands.
- Paste handles more cases automatically. Audacity can create a track when needed, adapt compatible channel layouts and paste audio files from the operating-system clipboard.
- Alignment guides, sample-boundary snapping and per-project snap settings have been added or expanded.
Interface and tools
- The interface has been rebuilt on Qt, with native high-DPI rendering.
- Toolbars and panels can be moved, docked, floated, shown or hidden.
- UI layouts can be saved as Workspaces. Audacity includes Modern, Classic and Music workspaces.
- Light, dark and high-contrast themes are available, along with accent colors, track colors and several clip styles.
- The new Home screen shows recent projects with preview thumbnails.
The separate Select, Envelope, Draw and Multi-tool modes have been removed. Their functions are now context-sensitive:
- Volume envelopes are displayed in the Clip gain mode.
- Sample drawing becomes available when the waveform is zoomed to individual samples.
- Splitting is available by holding S.
- Track and effect parameters use consistent rotary controls with fine adjustment and double-click reset.
- Sync-Lock has been removed. Delete, cut and paste now have explicit variants for either leaving a gap or moving later material to preserve timing.
Playback and recording
- The playhead remains visible during navigation and can be dragged to a new position.
- Playback can seek to another position without stopping.
- Recording can start anywhere on the timeline and creates a clip at that position.
- Loop boundaries and the interaction between playback, selections and loops have been revised.
- Punch and Roll, lead-in recording, latency compensation, software playthrough and per-track input monitoring have been rebuilt for the new interface.
- Audio Setup now includes system-default devices, refreshable device lists and custom channel mapping. Audacity can follow operating-system device changes automatically.
- Official Windows builds include ASIO playback and recording support.
Tracks, meters and effects
- Track headers now contain live playback and recording meters.
- Preset handling is consistent across built-in, destructive and realtime effects.
- Built-in effects, generators and analyzers have been rebuilt for the Qt interface.
- Supported plugin formats are VST3, Nyquist, LV2 on Linux and Audio Units on macOS. Audacity can display generated controls when a plugin's own interface is unavailable.
- Spectrogram has been redesigned with clearer guides and rulers, and faster rendering.
Projects, import and export
- Audacity 4 uses the new .aup4 project format.
- .aup3 projects open and convert to .aup4 without changing the original file. Converted projects cannot be saved back to .aup3.
- Older .aup projects can be imported.
- Project files store preview thumbnails and Audacity 4's additional clip and appearance data.
And last but not least, we had the audacity to change the Audacity logo.
Compatibility notes
The following Audacity 3 features are not available in Audacity 4.0, but we're working on adding them in future releases.
- Time Tracks
- Note/MIDI tracks
- Mixer
- Macro Manager and the scripting pipe
- VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting
- Play-at-speed
Sync-Lock and the old tool modes were replaced by the workflows described above.
Additionally, Audacity 4 ships with some missing exporting and rendering features, analyzers, and effects.
Update: audacity-sources-4.0.0.tar.xz was updated to include SoundTouch and sbsms 3rd-party libraries.
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