Audacity 3.2 Released with Real-Time and VST3 Effects, FFmpeg 5.0 and WavPack Support

Audacity 3.2

Audacity 3.2 has been released today as the latest stable version of this powerful, free, open-source, and cross-platform audio editor software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.

Audacity 3.2 is here almost a year after the Audacity 3.1 series and it introduces several exciting new features like real-time effects for the Audio Units, LADSPA, LV2, and VST3 plugins, support for VST3 effects, support for the WavPack open audio compression format, as well as support for the latest FFmpeg 5.0 multimedia framework.

As part of the new real-time effects feature, Audacity 3.2 adds a new Effects button to the tracks menu to allow you to place real-time effects. In addition, the Effects menu received a new sorting, and you’ll now find other sorting and grouping options in the Effects preferences. Here’s the real-time effects feature in action!

The UI received various changes as well, such as the merge of the mixer bar with the meter bars, a quick audio sharing feature, and a new Audio Setup button by default that replaces the Device toolbar (you’ll still be able to re-add the Device toolbar via the View > Toolbars menu).

Among other noteworthy changes, Audacity can now be compiled without JACK support on GNU/Linux systems, mpg123 is now used as the default MP3 importer instead of mad, there’s support for XDG directories on GNU/Linux systems, and plugins are now automatically scanned, tested, and enabled when Audacity starts.

Of course, Audacity 3.2 also fixes various issues to improve M4A/AAC support to let you set the bitrate between 98 and 160 kbit/s for mono or between 196 and 320 kbit/s for stereo, importing of MP3 files, batch processing, GTK packaging in AppImages, and other functionality.

Audacity’s license was updated as well as part of this major release for VST3 support. As such, the Audacity binaries are now licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3, while most of the code files remain under GPLv2-or-later.

You can check out the full release notes on the project’s GitHub page for extra reading and download Audacity 3.2 from the official website as an AppImage that you can run on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution without installing anything on your computer.

Last updated 1 year ago

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