Audacity 3.3 Released with More Real Time Effects

Audacity 3.3.0 brings new effects, new capabilities, and some experimental new features. A bucked-load of bug fixes, performance tweaks, and stability improvements are also included as standard.

One most famous pieces of free and open source software available, Audacity is professional-grade audio processing software, with official support for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

And its latest release will further cement that status.

Building on last autumn’s release, Audacity 3.3.0 makes more of its built-in effects realtime capable. The Bass & Treble, Distortion, Phaser, Reverb and Wahwah effects can now be applied to “live” input. There’s also a beta version of Beats and Bars — though I couldn’t find it.

A new effect, Shelf Filter, makes its debut in this update. It’s designed to compliment the preexisting High-pass, Low-pass, and Notch filters. You can access the new shelf filter from the Effect > EQ & Filters menu.

A new Linear (dB) ruler is included in this release that goes from 0 dBFS to -∞ dBFS. This, Audacity devs say, better reflects the volume as it appears in the recording/playback meters.

Developers also “reworked” the bottom toolbar dock. The “project sample rate” (formerly known as ‘project rate’) is now located in Audio Setup > Audio Settings; the snapping toolbar is independent of the selection toolbar; and there’s a new time signature toolbar in beta.

Other changes:

• No longer dithers tracks unnecessarily
• Linux playback has better output latency
• EQ effect no longer resets clip names
• Resampling a track will no longer trim it

Last but not least — check through the official release notes for more — when copying clips between projects in Audacity 3.3 you’re able to choose whether to copy smart clips or just the visible portion.

Download Audacity 3.3.0

Want to go hands-on with these changes?

You can download pre-compiled builds of Audacity 3.3 for Windows, macOS, and Linux (provided as an AppImage) from the Audacity website or Audacity GitHub releases page.

Linux users can also find Audacity on Flathub.

Prefer other avenues? Unofficial versions of Audacity (at varying version numbers) exists in the AUR, in PPAs on Launchpad, and as a snap on Canonical’s Snap Store.