by 
Audacity 3.4 open-source, free, and cross-platform audio editor software has been released today as a major update that introduces several new features and many improvements.
Coming more than six months after Audacity 3.3, the Audacity 3.4 release is here to introduce three new features, starting with music workflows, allowing you to switch between hh:mm:ss time and Beats & Measures, as well as to time-stretch clips to align them to a song’s tempo.
The second new feature is a new exporter window that gives you easier access to various options like custom mapping and sample rate, and adds native file browser support to the “Browse” button. Finally, the third new feature is time stretching support by holding the Alt key while hovering over the top third of a clip edge.
Among other noteworthy changes included in Audacity 3.4, there’s the ability to always use Joint Stereo mode for MP3 files for the best possible quality, simplified pasting logic and stereo tracks, cursors trimming and left and right stretching, uniform spectrogram colors, as well as built-in Opus support.
On top of that, Audacity no longer changes the project sample rate when importing audio, adds the Time Signature toolbar by default, sets the Solo button to multi-track mode by default, gives a wider starting range to time tracks by default, and no longer merges two clips when clicking on their border.
Under the hood, Audacity now uses the Conan 2.0 open-source C and C++ package manager. Of course, various bugs were addressed in this release to improve support for LV2 and VST2 plugins, nogap metadata, macros, clip pasting, and NVDA compatibility. For more details, check out the release notes.
You can download Audacity 3.4 right now from the official website as an AppImage universal binary that you can use on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution without installing anything.
Update 11/08/23: Audacity 3.4.1 is out now to fix 24-bit recording, .aup importing, crossfading of clips and tracks, external program exports, BSD and ARM builds, stereo tracks splitting into mono, file exporting, Opus exporting on older CPUs that don’t support AVX. It also adds Ctrl+J as a standard keyboard shortcut for joining clips.
Last updated 6 months ago
