Audacity 2.4.0 arrives with improvements to the weather toolbar and support for macOS Catalina

Audacity 2.4.0

For a long time the most popular free audio wave editing app (collected in articles like this) was without releasing frequent updates. That has changed more recently and yesterday May 16 I arrive Audacity 2.4.0, an update that, due to the numbering, should be more important, but it is difficult to improve a lot of software that was already good. Still, many new features have been introduced, starting with improvements to the weather toolbar.

In addition, they have also taken advantage of the launch to improve audio support. Starting with Audacity 2.4.0, the editor now supports the Opus (OggOpus) format. On the other hand, the import and export function has also been improved in general. Below you have the list of most outstanding novelties that have come along with this version, as we read in the wiki that they have published for the occasion.

Highlights of Audacity 2.4.0

  • Now it works officially on macOS Catalina.
  • The audio position has been removed from the selection toolbar and a new bar, the Time Toolbar, has been created. It is a bar that only serves to be read (read only) and shows the current position of the audio. Among its functions:
    • It is larger and easier to read the current position of the audio.
    • We can resize it, move it and fix it at various points.
    • You can change the time format it displays.
  • In previous versions we could only use the Export and Import buttons for VST and AU effects. Now this has been extended to all effects that have a button to manage them.
  • Multi-View, an advanced feature for expert users that enables the spectrogram and waveform views of the same audio to be displayed on the same track.
  • Opus has been added as an export option.
  • The behaviors of moving and resizing labels have been changed. This change has had to be made to correct several bugs.
  • Spectrograms now show clipping limits.
  • Improvements in wave selection.
  • Debugging from keyboard shortcuts: I moves forward and U moves backward.
  • Mute / unmute menus for selected tracks.
  • Changes in playback / recording setting.
  • New Effects and Analyzer:
    • The Loudness Normalization effect has been added.
    • Analyzer to measure RMS levels.
    • Noise gate.
    • Spectral elimination.
  • A page has been added to the manual.
  • Over 100 bugs have been fixed in this release, including over 50 first and second priority.

How to install the editor on Linux

Audácity 2.4.0 is here available for all supported systems, which are Windows, macOS and Linux. We have it available in different options, such as the source code that we can access from this link or an unofficial repository for Ubuntu that, while it is true that it may fail in the latest versions, it is also true that it does work in older versions. In the event that this is the option that interests you the most, you have to open a terminal and write the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/audacity
sudo apt update
sudo apt install audacity

If you use new generation packages, you also have to know that is available as Snap (sudo snap install audacity) and as Flatpak, by clicking this link. If the word "is" is crossed out in the previous sentence, it is because, at the time of writing, both the Snap version like Flatpak They are still in v2.3.3 of the software that was released in November 2019. Therefore, the most reliable options right now are to use the binaries or be patient, the wait being the best from my point of view because in the next few hours it should reach, at the very least, Flathub.

Considering that Audacity it was a long time without releasing updates, it is impossible to know when the next version will be released or what surprises it will bring us, but we do know that it will be Audacity 2.4.1, a maintenance update that will correct the bugs that have been found in the first version of this series.


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