Audacity 1.3.13 beta arrives, fully supports Windows 7

The Audacity Team has announced the arrival of version 1.3.13 of its open source audio editor and recorder, a beta that forms the basis for its upcoming 2.0 "stable" release. According to the developers, this latest development preview addresses several bugs found in the previous version and adds a few new features.

The Audacity 1.3.13 Beta now features full support for Windows 7 and a new "Sync-Lock Tracks" feature that allows groups of audio or label tracks to "retain synchronisation when the track length changes". For equalisation, a new "Managed Curves" dialogue has been added to import and export curves, as have new "Extended Import" Preferences, and MIDI tracks can now be vertically zoomed. The Control Toolbar is renamed to Transport Toolbar, and the Device Toolbar, which is enabled by default, now contains all input and output device choices, including host and recording channels.

Audacity 1.3.13 on Mac OS X. Installation on Mac OS X has been made simpler using a top-level "Audicity" folder and, on Windows and Linux, the Close window button and other system close or shutdown commands now quit on closing the last window. Automatic Crash Recover, which saves all project changes in the event of a crash, has also been improved.

The developers advise users running Windows 7, Vista and Mac OS X 10.6 to run the latest beta rather than the 1.2 branch of Audacity. However, as with all development releases, use in production environments is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter. A new beta, version 1.3.14, is expected to "follow soon".

More details about this development release, including a list of known issues, can be found in the release notes, in the official release announcement and on the New features in Audacity 1.3 page. The Audacity 1.3.13 Beta is available to download from one of the project's mirrors and documentation is also provided.

Audacity is a cross-platform, open source audio editor and recorder that can be used, for example, to import live audio, import Ogg VOrbis, MP3, WAV, or AIFF files, cut, copy and mix sounds together and alter pitch in recorded audio. Hosted on SourceForge, Audacity source code is licensed under the GPLv2. The latest stable release is Audacity 1.2.6 from mid-November of 2006.

See also:

• SourceForge apologises to Audacity team for malicious ads, a report from The H.

(crve)