A brand new version of Audacity, the open-source audio workstation, has been released.

Audacity 3.4 includes a number of new features and improvements, include new music workflows that will greatly enhance the editor’s appeal with musicians.

One of the biggest new features in Audacity 3.4 is a new Beat and Measures grid. This new view makes it easier to align clips to a project’s tempo and rhythm, with options to show subdivisions, and snap clips to the nearest beat.

Also included is a new Time Stretch tool. This makes it a breeze to change the duration of an audio clip without affecting the pitch (which most traditional time stretch tools do). It does this using a new algorithm ‘specifically made for music’ which, the project says, outperforms commercial options.

Finally, there’s a new exporter view that groups together all options into a single window, no need to pop up different dialogs to adjust things first. Audacity say “the exporter now features the native file browser, giving you access to all your bookmarked folders”.

You can see these new features in action in the video below:

Other changes include:

  • For MP3, Audacity now always uses Joint Stereo mode
  • Spectrogram colors are now perceptually uniform
  • Simplified pasting logic
  • Stereo tracks now always have synchronized clip starts/ends
  • Project sample rate no longer changes when importing audio
  • Time Signature toolbar now displays by default
  • Solo button is set to multi-track mode by default
  • Time tracks have a wider starting range by default
  • Clips no longer merge when clicking on the border between them
  • Opus support

Overall, Audacity 3.4 sounds like a significant upgrade, making one of the best free audio editors available even better.

Audacity 3.4 is free, open-source software available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can download the latest release from the Audacity website.

Linux users can also get an official build from Flathub, or install a community-maintained package from the Canonical Snap Store (neither updated to the latest release at the time of writing).


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