New features in Audacity 3.0.2

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New features in Audacity 3.0.2

This page is an overview of prominent new functionality that has been introduced in Audacity 3.0.2

Version 3.0.2 is primarily a maintenance release.

Details of all the major changes since 3.0.0 can be found in Audacity 3.0.2.

Overview

Audacity 3.0.2 is about bugfixes for Audacity 3.0.0. Some bugs which didn't show up in our testing of 3.0.0 became apparent once 3.0.0 was being used by more users. We wanted to fix these and also to get more diagnostic information about what goes wrong when SQLite (the database we use) can't read or write a file. So we added more informative diagnostics for when there is an error.

One cluster of bugs we fixed relate to Unicode. Unicode is a system for representing many non-English letters and symbols. We, Microsoft and Apple all have made mistakes with Unicode that affected Audacity 3.0.0. One during 3.0.0 turned out to be a Windows update issue with Unicode input, which was resolved by a later Windows update. Disappearing checkmarks in macOS Big Sur release turned out to be a Unicode issue, believed to be in Apple code, which we in 3.0.2. A with Unicode prevented Audacity working in Korean and Japanese.

Some of our bug-fixes are small changes in areas where the previous Audacity behaviour was not as we wanted. 3.0.2 may only be a 'point' release, but we think it's one most people using 3.0.0 will want.

Bugs we've had trouble with

After 3.0.0 was launched a few users discovered a couple of mysterious bugs which we had not encountered in our extensive QA testing of alpha and Release Candidate builds. These two important bugs that 3.0.0 users saw were hard for us to track down as we could not replicate them. We added extra diagnostic information to help us do that:

Error: Failed to open database file

There was an error which only occurred occasionally for a few users but had us mystified. Usually this seemed to occur when trying to import an audio file, but there may have been other ways it could happen. It did not appear to be causing users to experience data loss or damaged projects. It was this bug:

We added a Show Log to this error message so we could gather more information about this to aid the developers in analyzing the issue. This led to what's probably a solution, as Jack L, with this extra logging, was able to get the problem sufficiently often for us to get a handle on it. This extra information told us that in some circumstances we were trying to access the disk before it was ready again, with back to back requests too quickly. Paul then changed the logic of opening a database so that two important requests were always one after the after. This should address the opening issue. Leland added a retry, so that if SQLite can't yet read the database, it tries again, but fractionally later. The retry timeout should benefit all code in Audacity that reads the database, not just at the time of opening. Jack L then ran his ~~torture tests~~ workload and the problem he experienced was gone.

Even so, because the original error was only occasional, we can't know for sure that it, or similar issues, are gone! We still have the extra logging in Audacity. If you do encounter the dialog indicating a problem, please click on the Show Log chevron to generate the log and send us a copy of the screenshot to the . You may see a variant of the message, "The project's database failed to reopen"

This can normally be resolved by simply exiting Audacity, relaunching and then making the required import of an audio file.

False recovery offered on launch

This is another mysterious issue which only occurred very occasionally and was foxing us.

Sometimes after exiting Audacity without saving the project when offered, on the next relaunch a false recovery can be offered when there is really nothing to be recovered as no crash has occurred to cause this. We think this error had the same underlying cause, but we don't know for sure.

If you do see this error, please let us know what you can of how it happened.

Updating from Audacity 2.x to Audacity 3.x

With the release of Audacity 3.0.0 the project file structure of Audacity was changed significantly with the entire project contained in a single unified database file.

If you have already updated to 3.0.0 you should already be aware of this.

Manage Macros improvements

The Manage Macros dialog has been improved for this release:

The Cancel button has been removed
It is replaced with a Close button
A new Save button has been added to enable you to save the results of editing a Macro.

The Save button is grayed-out until you edit a Macro.

Changes in Macros working on files

We have extended the options in Directories Preferences to include a new entry for Macro output.

If you leave the entry for Macro output blank then Audacity will default to creating a folder called "macro-output" in:

Windows: C:\Users\<your username>\Documents\Audacity
Mac: /Users/<your username>/Documents

Note carefully that this diverges from previous behavior with 3.0.0 and earlier where a "macro-output" directory was created/used in the same directory as the files to be processed by the Macro.

We believe that a single rationalized folder for all Macro output from processing files with Macros is a more sensible approach.

New features in Audacity 3.0.2