A new version of Audacity, the popular open-source audio editor, is available for download.
Audacity 3.7.5 is the latest in the 3.7.x series of maintenance releases launched last year. Major new features are not the focus, only (still welcome) fixes and tune-ups to improve usability and stability.
For avid audio makers and avowed fans of Audacity, the decision to focus on refinement is a welcome one, if only for the reduced risk of inopportune crashes wiping away hours of work.
The terse highlights in the Audacity 3.7.5 release:
- FLAC importer now supports 32-bit PCM
- Crash caused by rendering spectrum view now fixed
- Importing WAV files up to 7ms no longer triggers crash
- Macro Wizard is less buggy
A handful of library bumps are also on board, namely libopus 1.5.2, libcurl 8.12.1, and libpng 1.6.50.
More notably, Audacity 3.7.5 add support for Windows on ARM (WoA), albeit in beta and front-loaded with caveats: no plugin support, requires the native WoA version of FFmpeg to be installed, and given the nascent availability (and affordability) of WoA devices, there’s not been much testing.
But hey: that’s why it’s a beta – “your feedback is welcome”, say the developers.
Big things ahead
The Audacity 3.7.x series is focused on bug fixes for a reason: Audacity 4.
Audacity 4.0 will present “an entirely new UI” using Qt proper (yes, no more wxWidgets), as well as under-the-hood changes to ensure the sound editing tool can take full take advantage of modern hardware, input devices, and such like.
Download Audacity 3.7.5
Audacity is free, open source software. Source code is on GitHub, should you fancy building it by source.
The latest release can be download from the project’s website (with or without Muse Hub, an audio-focused store selling plugins, loops, sound packs owned by the MuseScore, who own Audacity) or from the project GitHub.
The official Linux download is available as AppImage (which says it’s for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, but it runs fine on Ubuntu 24.04 and above).
You can find Audacity on Flathub but the listing is unverified, while the Audacity Snap on the Snap Store is not packaged by Audacity, and is often slow to be updated (it’s currently on 3.7.1 – this release is 3.7.5), so keep that in mind.
The Audacity Snap also includes Intel OpenVINO AI plugins for noise suppression, music generation, and audio transcription. The plugins only work on Intel hardware and may require the download of additional “models” to make use of them.
Older versions are available in the Ubuntu repos if you don’t need the latest features, just run a sudo apt install audacity to get it.