Audacity is an excellent application for all your audiobook and podcasting needs. The recent version changes merit some discussion.
Audacity continues to be an excellent free and open source audio editor for podcasts and audiobooks. But the recent version of the software made some major changes that almost made me look for alternatives. However, with a little trial and error, I was able to find fixes for the issues. Today I want to talk about some of the changes and the solutions I found for the issues. It is also worth noting that some of the bugs have been fixed in subsequent minor releases.
New File Format
The first major change is a large overhaul in the application file format. The old .aup file was little more than an index for a large folder of raw data. The problem with this format is usually file types are single files, not collections of files. The new version of the file format, .aup3, combines all the files into a single file, though it is a large file, spanning over 100 MB for a short five-minute track.
While this is a good overall plan, it did come with a bug I noticed in that after editing down my audiobook files for final mastering, I found that filters took a long time to apply, and some of the required filters, like the RMS Normalize filter, did not appear to work at all. This left me scratching my head, and unable to properly process my audiobook files.
The fix is to save the file format as a .wav file and run the filters on that file, which solved all my problems.
Recording Frequency
Recording frequency is an odd little bug, but myself and others have had some issue with the default frequency, at least after an upgrade to the Audacity version 3.4.2. I did find that a clean new install on either this version (the current version on Ubuntu during the writing), and the new version, 3.7, did not have this problem. It would appear the challenge is one of updating and a setting not changed.
In the event your frequency is not properly set to 44.1Hz (the required mp3 frequency for ACX audio files), the fix is to go into your Audio Setup (either in preferences or with the new toolbar option) and go to Audio Settings. Find the project sample rate, and set that to 44.1 Hz, but also set the Buffer Length to 100 ms and the Latency Compensation to -130 ms and that should solve your issues.
Pasting In Corrections
This was an early bug in version 3.4.0 and resolved in 3.4.2, but if you encounter the error that says There is not enough room available to paste the selection, then you need to toggle a few of the settings in Preferences --> Tracks --> Tracks Behaviors. The settings that are conflicting are Enable cut lines and Editing a clip can move other clips. Disable both of those and try again. These should be resolved in the latest versions, but some people are still having issues on upgrades.
Audio Setup
We mentioned briefly above that Audacity recently added a new toolbar for Audio Setup. By default, on first install or upgrade, nothing may be selected to record from. This new tool is very nice in that it gives a whole range of audio source selections for recording and monitoring. It also provides a quick link directly into your settings, so make sure to go in there and select your settings before you start recording. You no longer select your microphone from the Microphone dropdown toolbar, use the new Audio Setup toolbar instead.
Hopefully these tips will help you keep using Audacity for all your audiobook production needs.