New Audacity Beta Released
Posted by Migo on May 9th, 2008
Usually when I hear about beta releases I just kind of brush them to the side. This is mainly because most beta software I’ve tested haven’t really been ready for beta-testing. Every move causes a bug to kill the program and you lose more and more hair as a result of it. However, when I heard that the new beta Audacity, version 1.3.5, had been released today my interested was piqued. As someone who uses Audacity at least twice a month for hours on end, this got me going for a couple of reasons.
The first being that I usually have about an hour worth of audio to plow through and edit, not an easy task to be sure, but Audacity makes it much easier than most audio software I’ve used. So it become less of a chore and I’ve actually gotten the editing process down to about two hours on a slow day.
The second reason is that the nice folks who work on Audacity seem to have put a lot of love into this new beta version. The old one crashed on me repeatedly, as did the stable version for a while, and it would stall without notice or error message. This new beta seems to have fixed some of the stability issues the old beta suffered from, and I think my hairline may be happy to hear that.
While, as always, beta versions of software are not meant for heavy work environments where loss of data is unimaginable, this new version may be something that the average home podcaster or garage band may want to check out. It’s free, which is the second best price ever (the first is having someone pay you to take it), and its powerful. You really can’t ask for more than that.
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