Although Audacity isn’t the most feature packed audio editor, it’s been over nine years since Audacity first launched a new version for the popular editor. If you are one of many fans who are eagerly waiting for a new release, then you’ll be glad to know that you can now download Audacity 3.0.
At the moment, Audacity is available for Windows, Mac and Linux as an open-source audio editor. The app allows users to record, edit and apply post-processing effects to music, podcasts and other types of audio. In the latest release, the company addressed over 160 bugs. Apart from this, the new version sees a number of significant improvements along with a new project file format.
If you have used the software before, then you already know that in the previous version of Audacity, when you wanted to save a project file, the software would create .aup file to let you know where all of the audio and other files associated with the project are located. However, if you moved or deleted some of the audio files, the project session wouldn’t work properly.
In order to resolve this issue, the developers have introduced a new .aup3 that contains everything including the audio files. Moreover, the new file format allows the software to run faster and recover more quickly in case there’s a crash.
In the official blog post, Audacity’s James Crook said, “The technical detail is that we are using an open source database, SQLite3, to store everything in one .aup3 file. That all happens ‘behind the scenes’. SQLite3 is open source, and it is a delight to work with. Nevertheless, this was a huge change, and we decided it was too risky to include many other changes we wanted to make at the same time – so 3.0.0 is almost entirely about this big format change.”
If you are worrying if you’ll be able to use old file formats in case you upgrade, you don’t need to worry as the old audacity projects will automatically be converted to .aup3.
