I worked on Audacity 4, here is what you need to know

Transcript

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this Audacity 4 tour. My name is Leo Wattenberg, and I was a designer on Audacity 4. Today I wanted to show you all of the things we have been up to in the past couple of years. For this, I’m using the Audacity 4 beta. And as you can see, it has an actual functioning dark theme. It also has a functioning light theme that looks pretty sleek. On the next screen here, we ask you about what clip visualizations you want.

We have added a new and colorful logic which just colors each track differently. However, if you prefer the Audacity 3 style, you also have that available to you. You’ll notice that this is going to be a little bit of a theme in this video because one of our guiding principles was to keep Audacity modern, of course, but to keep it familiar to those who have been used to Audacity 3 for the past many, many years. Because of this, we also have different options for what you want in your toolbar.

I’ll get back to that later. And of course, audio.com is with us, as was the case in Audacity 3. We also have, last but not least, some info we need to show you about updates and such. And you see here that we also use a UUID to track how many people use Audacity each day. This is the entire extent of telemetry in Audacity; it just tells the team how many people use Audacity each day. And with that, we are already through the setup.

Recording and Track Controls

We’re now on the welcome screen, just like you would be in Audacity 3. And after we set up our playback device and recording device, we are ready. I can now just start recording. And as you can see—well, it’s pretty unexciting—it records, all right. You see that we have a little bar here on the left. That is your input and output bar for the track, or meter for the track, and it tells you how loud you’re recording at any given time.

The choice to put it into a track was made because we want to add multitrack recording at some point in the future, so you can record your microphone and something like a Zoom call at the same time. This functionality is not in this Audacity 4 beta and it will not be in Audacity 4 at launch, but this is definitely something that the team wants to add in the future. Anyway, once we have made our recording, we can now start editing.

Editing Tools and Workflow

If you’re familiar with Audacity 3’s ways, you will remember that we have all these different modes, and if you’re using an even older version of Audacity, there are even more of these tool modes in them. In Audacity 4, we have gotten rid of them. That’s not to say that we have removed them; you still can draw just fine, but it’s not a mode anymore because even though I can draw now, if I just move my cursor away from what I’m drawing here, I can still select. Look at that.

It didn’t need to be a different thing that you navigate through with your F keys after all. The one thing that remained a button out of the ones you saw a second ago is the envelopes, or clip gain as we call them now. This works just the same as it did in Audacity 3, except it’s a lot cleaner in its visualizations and it is a mode because—look at this—I can still select.

This is the sort of thing that may look a little bit banal at the beginning of a tour, but this is actually what hopefully is going to make editing a lot easier in Audacity 4 compared to 3. We have also added a new mode which is the split tool. For the split tool, well, you select it and then you click into your clip to split it. It’s that simple.

It may not look like much in the beginning, but it allows you to do something like this where you can click and click to get the little section that I edited out. And now all I have to do is press delete or backspace to delete it. The first time you delete something, we ask you what you expect to happen because there’s actually a roughly 50/50 split between what people think should happen here. The faster thing to do is to allow rippling on the entire track.

That is my preference, but of course, if you have a different preference, this is where you can choose it. Initially, anyway, you can also change it later in the preferences. Once I have made this, voilà, the little spike I made a second ago is now gone. And this is something that allows you to edit really quickly. So, I can just click and click and delete, and then click and click and delete, and work my way through misspeaks and whatever else there might be in my audio track.

But you’ll note that it leaves behind all of these separate clips, and this is by design because these different clips I can, for one, move anywhere I want and drop anywhere I want. And I can move them to a new track even though there was no new track before I moved it there. And even if I delete something, I can just take it and make it reappear because all of this editing is non-destructive.

No matter how you have edited, as long as you’ve been using clips, you will be able to undo your mistakes much later on without having to physically undo all of the editing steps in between. One thing we’ve added to our clips is color. We can now just select a clip and color it—let’s say, yellow. And in whatever mental editing system I have going on, I can now remember, “Ah, yes, this is the part that I wanted to clean up or edit later,” whatever the case may be.

I’m telling you what coloring clips is, but it’s a really useful thing that Audacity 3 technically kind of sort of maybe supported, but not really; now it actually works the way that you think it should. Speaking of which, sync lock was a feature in Audacity 3 that is not a feature in Audacity 4 because we now have a thing that works the way you would expect it to. Sync lock did two things: one was that it kept everything in sync.

So, if I make a little selection in my clip here and want to delete this while also keeping the stuff above here in sync, I can right-click “Delete and Close Gap on All Tracks,” or use Ctrl+Delete / Ctrl+Backspace, and this moves all tracks backwards to close the gap and ripple everything forwards. It’s a very standard feature, now a feature in Audacity. The other thing that sync lock did was allow grouping of clips.

And indeed, you can now just select a clip, Shift-click on another clip to select it, and group clips (or Ctrl+G). Now, whenever I select one clip, both get selected, and whenever I do anything to one clip, both clips get the treatment. But enough about editing. On the left here, you see that our track headers look slightly different.

In Audacity 3, there were two sliders on top of each other, which often resulted in people moving one when they meant to move the other just by misclicking. This should no longer be possible in Audacity 4 because the only slider here is the volume and the only knob here is the panning. The way panning works in software—in Audacity anyway—is that it’s basically a slider that doesn’t move.

So, I can drag it up or down to increase and decrease the value, or right or left; the direction doesn’t matter. If you want to increase it, just drag it wherever you think a slider would increase. You can also double-click it to reset it. Mute, solo, and the big effects button are still with us. The effects you get in here are real-time effects. A real-time effect is an effect that, as the name suggests, happens in real time.

So, I can edit things while messing about with the effect and it reacts immediately. When I’m done making my changes, I can just close it and it will continue working. Now it’s possible to change effects at any point in time without having to undo a whole bunch and losing hours of work just to make the change. If you want to hard-apply an effect, that of course is still possible through the Effect menu, just like it was before.

Effects and Interface

The only thing you may notice that has changed here is that the effects look slightly different, but they work just the same. For the noise reduction, for example, we have just made it a little bit clearer for people who maybe don’t know how this effect works. It’s at this point where I have to acknowledge that something like AI noise reduction exists, and this is something that may well end up in Audacity, maybe even Audacity 4.0.

It’s just that the way AI noise reduction works is very different from the classic method that we’re using here. AI noise reduction tends to regard music as noise, which is correct if you’re trying to make a Zoom call intelligible while there’s some bar music playing in the background. But if you actually want to use noise reduction on music content, it’s, well, garbage. So, whatever happens, this guy will definitely stick around. Letting our gaze move upwards, you’ll see that we have a toolbar—just one this time.

But this one toolbar you can customize by clicking onto this gear. So, if you think, for example, that play, stop, and record are features that nobody uses, you can disable them here. At the moment, we have pretty much all of the functions we had in Audacity 3 in here, with one exception: this new “toggle spectral view,” where you can change your view into spectral mode on our tracks. If you didn’t know that Audacity had a spectral view, now you do.

And in Audacity 4, it finally is very easily accessible. You can also resize the track and add a little vertical ruler so you know what things go to which frequency. You can also right-click onto the ruler itself to make changes to it if you want to look at only a couple of these things instead. As for other buttons, you’ll see here at the top—just as in Audacity 4—the playback meter.

This is your entire mix, whereas the guys that you see on each track here—those show you… well, while not playing, it shows you the microphone, but when you start playing, it shows you the playback level of the clip. If you think that this guy up here is a little bit too small, you can make it larger or click on it and make it go into a sidebar. So now it’s this massive sidebar that goes across your entire screen.

Right now, all of these features that you’re seeing are pretty much present in Audacity 3 as well, although with some weird caveats. In Audacity 4, this customization at the moment is not that great; however, there will be a lot coming in the future. For example, MIDI editing is not going to use the same set of buttons that something like sound editing would. Because of this, we’ve already implemented workspaces where you can switch between different views and different presets.

Because this is the beta, it doesn’t quite work yet, but you can see that the position of these bars, the sidebar, and things like that change when I switch between them. At the very tippy top of Audacity 4 in the menus, you’ll see that the transport menu has given way to just a record menu. The reason is that I don’t think anyone ever goes to Transport > Play and then any of these options by hand; they would rather just use these buttons.

And so, we didn’t think this menu was necessary. Record has a couple of features like the lead-in recording—previously known as punch and roll recording—that need to be distinguished. Although, in the future, I think there will be a little triangle next to this record button, maybe similar to this guy over here that you can click and that then contains all of the options that you could want here.

Preferences and Project Saving

There’s one more thing in the preferences I want to show you. The preferences are inherently unexciting.

We have slightly reorganized them to match what Audacity 4 is actually doing. And if you are unhappy with your theme, you can go back into light theme in here and do whatever other change you think is best for you. However, what I wanted to show you is that some of these preferences—and by the time launch happens, hopefully most of them—have some sort of visualization or visual aid where appropriate to show you what the preference is actually about.

Just to get away from an endless list of checkboxes and radio buttons and drop-downs. All righty, that is everything for the project. So, let’s save the project. You’ll see this ad for audio.com; you can choose to never see it again, then save to the computer. And now, as you can see, we have an AUP4 file that we’re going to save here. Difference? Not much, but Audacity 4 projects don’t work in Audacity 3, while Audacity 3 projects do open in Audacity 4.

If I now have this project and name it in a way that I definitely will be able to recognize in a hundred years’ time on what I’ve been doing here… normally I would be pretty [lost], because who can remember what I just wrote there? However, in Audacity 4, we also take a little screenshot.

So, if you then look at it in the home tab in the projects view, you can see what you have been working on recently and hopefully the image is a little bit more recognizable to you if you’re not that great at naming your files. And here you also see a learn tab, and hopefully by the time Audacity 4 actually gets released, there will be a whole bunch of tutorials in here waiting for you. And there you go. It’s Audacity 4 beta 1.

I hope you enjoy testing this and if you’re watching this later, I hope you’re enjoying a more stable version of Audacity than I’m using here. If you like this video, give it a like and I hope to see you soon.

Audacity 4 beta download

You can download the Audacity 4 beta from https://www.audacityteam.org/next/