Download Audacity 2.0.5 RC1

A development version of the open source audio editor Audacity has been released. Available for Windows, Linux, and OS X, the program can record sound, import and export wav, aiff, ogg, and mp3 files. It has an unlimited undo function and also has a large collection of effects on board, such as fade-in and fade-out, echo, tempo change and noise reduction. More effects can be added easily as the program supports both vst and ladspaplugins† Since version 2.0.4 the following changes and improvements have been made:

Changes and Improvements:

• Track Menu:
  • The separate commands that aligned track start or end with the cursor or with selection start are combined into “Cursor/Selection Start” commands.
  • “Align and Move Cursor” renamed to “Move Selection when Aligning”.
• Label Tracks:
  • Labels Editor now allows empty labels to be saved on closing the editor.
  • TAB and SHIFT+TAB when the label track has focus now always move forwards or backwards respectively to the nearest label.
• (Windows) On a very few machines, the Windows WDM-KS low latency audio host introduced in Audacity 2.0.4 caused Audacity to hang or the computer to crash. WDM-KS has been removed from 2.0.5 until it can be safely enabled.
• (Windows and OS X) Screen reader improvements for Install VST Effects dialog.
• (OS X) Audio Unit plug-ins detected by Audacity on launch are now not loaded until chosen from the Effect menu. This should speed up launch and avoid crashes at launch due to misbehaving Audio Units.
• (Linux) Update to PortAudio r1910 fixes memory and other bugs under ALSA.
• (Linux) Applied fix for wxGTK 2.8.12 bug which resulted in loss of Audacity’s menu bar (or visual corruption under Unity) on Debian-based systems.

Bug fixes for:

• Shaped dither was corrupted and too loud on all stereo exports except FLAC.
• Keyboard Preferences: some Edit and Align commands for different sub-menus showed the same name.
• Recordings stopped with “Stop and Set Cursor” shortcut could not be undone.
• In locales that use comma for decimal separator:
  • Text boxes with slider in Nyquist effects only produced whole numbers when using comma to enter a fractional number. Text boxes without slider still have this problem.
  • Built-in generators produced silence after running a Nyquist effect.
• (Windows) When first changing to Windows WASAPI host, the input volume slider in Mixer Toolbar was enabled when it should have been permanently disabled.
• (Windows) On some machines, launching Audacity then recording from the current Device Toolbar input would not record until the input was reselected.
• (OS X) Frequent crashes occurred on importing audio files on some machines.
• (OS X) Files did not open using Finder “Open with”, double-clicking the file or dragging the file to the Audacity icon.
• (Linux 64-bit) Fixed a crash when using Equalization.
• (Linux) It was not possible to open an effect or other dialog then navigate through the dialog using TAB.
• (Linux) The Play shortcut did not play a read-directly WAV, AIFF or FLAC import if the warning for importing uncompressed files appeared.