Audacity 2.4.1
www.snipca.com/35046 What you’ll need: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10
Small, powerful and loaded with features, Audacity is by some distance our favourite audio-editing tool. Like most software, however, it’s not immune to bugs. Hours after releasing version 2.4 last month, the developers had to pull it following the discovery of a bug that corrupted audio when you had more than one Audacity window open. Impressively, version 2.4.1 (select the Audacity Windows Installer option at the URL above) was released just two days later, fixing the bug and delivering the new features promised by its short-lived predecessor.
The most noticeable of these features is the larger track position indicator at the bottom right of the window (you can resize this or even undock it from the toolbar if you prefer). Additionally, you can now use two new keyboard shortcuts to search for a specific point in a track. Holding the I key moves you forward, while holding U moves you back. You’ll hear the track play as you move through it (a process known as ‘scrubbing’). And for those who crave as much information as possible about their tracks, Audacity now lets you see a simultaneous waveform (showing volume) and spectrogram (frequency) view for each track.
This version also adds a couple of new effects. Noise Gate lets you remove background noise in quiet sections of your recordings (such as between tracks in an album you’ve digitised from vinyl), while Loudness Normalisation lets you reduce the volume of your tracks to a set level.
If you use Audacity to edit recordings with multiple tracks (for example, to separate tracks for each instrument in a music recital), you can now quickly mute or unmute all selected tracks, letting you focus on the ones you’re working on. Simply select the tracks you want to mute (hold down Ctrl while clicking them), then open the Tracks menu, ‘Mute/ Unmute’, then select the ‘Mute tracks’ or ‘Unmute tracks’ option. Alternatively, use the Ctrl+alt+u or Ctrl+alt+shift+u keyboard shortcuts to mute and unmute respectively.
1 To see a combined spectrogram and waveform view of your recordings, click the Audio Track button at the top right of the relevant track, then select ‘Multi-view’ in the dropdown menu.
2 You can reduce or increase the size of the track position indicator by clicking and dragging the right edge of the toolbar; to undock it from the toolbar, click and drag the left edge.
3 Click the up arrow to change what the track position indicator displays, including making it more precise by including hundredths or thousandths of a second.
4 To use the two new effects in this version (as well as Audacity’s other effects), select the section of your track that you want to apply the effect to, then open the Effect menu.