> You can now change the duration of your audio clips without affecting their pitch non-destructively. Audacity 3.4 uses a new time stretching algorithm specifically made for music, which outperforms many of the commercially available options.<p>Way to bury the lede! What's this magic algorithm being spoken of, how does it work so well?<p>> A more detailed overview of these changes can be found in our <a>changelog</a>.<p>The changelog is even more terse, saying only which key combo activates it :(<p>A way bigger deal to me is mentioned at the bottom of the "other changes" in said changelog: Opus support!<p>Edit: wait, under "libraries" it says<p>> lib-time-and-pitch implements a time stretching algorithm originating in Staffpad. It currently is one of the highest-quality time stretching algorithms for music on the market.<p>Staffpad links to <a href="https://staffpad.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://staffpad.net</a> and seems to be some music app. The library name links to a Microsoft repository (<a href="https://github.com/audacity/audacity/tree/e4bc052201eb0e6e22956cb6426e88661713c6d6/libraries/lib-time-and-pitch">https://github.com/audacity/audacity/tree/e4bc052201eb0e6e22...</a>) with no readme. The source code is documentation enough :)
Speaking of which, how did that "audacity isn't FOSS" fuss end up?
A quick search shows tenacity is still active ( <a href="https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity</a> ) but I have no idea how much the projects kept interacting after the initial debate
Feedback on release:<p>- Overall great.<p>- The tempo stretching example in the video was too subtle for me. I listened a few times and had trouble telling the difference.<p>- The documentation at <a href="https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html</a> is still for 3.3 which is a bit frustrating when trying out new features. Also the link labeled Manual that is displayed in the splash screen 404s for me.<p>- It took a bit too long to scan my computer for plugins and at the end I was told some plugins were deemed incompatible but not why.<p>Suggestions on next steps:<p>- I want to download songs and map the tempo to the song. That way I can easily loop over few bars when practicing an instrument.<p>- Today I use Ableton for this which can automatically detect the tempo of a clip, and align bar and beat markers to the song, without stretching the audio. It also does a decent job of following tempo variations within a clip. This all started working well in version 11.3.2.<p>I tried to use Audacity for this and these were my impressions:<p>- Opus support makes it easy to work with material from Youtube.<p>- Adding clips to tracks obscures beat and bar markings making them difficult to align with transients.<p>- Having to generate a metronome track is a bit clunky.<p>- Stem separation would be a nice addition so that I could easily mute the instrument I'm playing.
Have there been any improvements in noise reduction?<p>That's what's always kept me from using Audacity in the past. I like the interface and operations and everything, but cleaning up audio (removing room tone mostly) has always been the first step in my workflow, and its built-in noise reduction has just been unusably terrible compared to basic commercial tools.<p>Or is there a common plugin people use with it that I've never known about?
This is a big deal! My primary use of Audacity was to create custom edits of tracks I wanted to mix, saving effort later when DJing. Aligning my edits with the beat grid always took a lot of work, so much so that I hacked up a different audio editor, trying to integrate beat detection (<a href="https://github.com/marssaxman/gum-audio">https://github.com/marssaxman/gum-audio</a>). Audacity felt like it was frustratingly behind the times in this regard; well, it's five years later now, but I'm glad to see they've made it happen.
Audacity, despite its weaknesses compared to commercial tools, still excels at batch processing due to its Nyquist plugin suite. The macro tool is finicky, but you can still do things that nothing else can in a batch, like trimming leading and trailing silence and then adding an exact amount of silence to the front and end of a file. You would think functions so simple and obvious as this would already exist in Audition, RX, SpectraLayers, etc., but no.
this is made in wxWidgets by the way, a cross platform c++ GUI framework like Qt but 100% free<p>on the other hand inkscape is made with gtkmm(gtk), which also runs cross platform.
These are some really nice quality of life updates. I've never used time stretching, but combined with the beats and measure markers, it could be really nice.
Does anyone know if there's an AI music app in which I can sing my melodies into and it then automatically adds AI drums, bass and other instruments? Be even cooler if i change my singing voice too<p>I loved Apple's Music Memos (works still on some old iPhones) as I could strum my guitar and sing my songs in it to automagically with one click add AI drums and bass (tempo could be changed/edited). They discontinued the app a few years ago, unfortunately.
3.4 removes the functionality that clicking on a clip separator no longer joins clips, but I have long joined at separators by highlighting an area with join(s), then using this macro set to the keyboard shortcut "j":<p><pre><code> Join:
SelectNone:</code></pre>
Is there a good reason why there isn't a hot key combo for zooming on tracks with a Mac in 2023? Command + is the standard for a lot of media editors in Mac OS.