I was so excited to get Audacity installed on my Eee PC the other day, that I didn’t notice at first that I’d installed Audacity 1.2.6. What I really wanted was Audacity 1.3.3 beta or at the very least 1.3 beta.
What’s the difference? Well, there are a bunch of improvements in the 1.3 line, but the single most important change for me is in the way Audacity handles WAV splitting. In Audacity 1.2 the only way to grab a portion of the audio track and move it to the left or right is to create a new audio track. What I frequently need to do is chop an audio file up into lots of little itty pieces and place them on a timeline, which you can do with Audacity 1.3. If that didn’t make any sense at all to you, just take a look at the image above.
Brad — Interesting approach. Great to hear about the improvements in Audacity, I’m also using Linux at home for this type of stuff now so I’ll have to check it out.
The way you have rigged Audacity 1.3 to run is a strange setup though, I recommend you investigate “backports”, they are packages which are new but “ported back” to the libraries which are installed on your existing setup. Run a few searches on the topic and you’ll see what I mean.
What you are currently doing is using Windows libraries instead, meaning that you potentially have the same components being loaded into memory, and the stability you speak of could go down as a result of your running Windows binaries on Linux. Best to keep it Linux-on-Linux whenever possible, especially with native apps like Audacity.
Good luck my friend, I really enjoy your blog!
Thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely look into backports!
Ok, I should explain further:
Audacity uses some Linux libraries which are on your computer. These libraries are too “old” for the latest version, so you can use a Backport to get around this.
The solution you have come up with is to use the equivalent Windows libraries as an alternative. Unfortunately, they are just emulating files that you already have on your computer.
Often people run programs which require the same libraries, so they are loaded into memory. The approach you have taken avoids this, so you have two copies in memory (potentially) meaning that you probably have fewer resources to utilize for editing that you would if you used a Backport.
Since you’re using an apt-based repository system you can likely use Debian or Ubuntu backports if you can find out which of the recent distributions are the same version as your Xandros setup.
Again, good luck.