Audacity has been pushing its new upgrade on me for a couple of months. I usually put off upgrading in the middle of a project, but I grew tired of the prompts. When I asked Google if I was going to have to relearn a new system, I was informed that I could choose to use "classic" mode and everything would be the same. My life has been nothing but misery since.
You can, as Google says, choose "classic" mode in the beginning, which gives you a similar layout, but it does not give you the same features. I just need basic functionality to record my books for ACX, but that has been blown to the wayside. For example, the options to rerecord over parts of your project you are dissatisfied with are worded differently and offer different functionality.
Then, there is the fact that Audacity 4 will not open a file from Audacity 3. This means that when you try to open one, you have to "convert" it into 4. You will now have two files (labeled about the same) in your folder. You can no longer work on 3 in Audacity 4. This means that as I started editing in Audacity 4 and getting more and more frustrated with the awfulness of it, I could not go back until the 3 chapters of work I had converted and worked on were finished, and I was willing to never want to work on those again. That is where I am at now--trying to finish these so I can roll back.
The next major issue I had was that keyboard hotkeys for cut, copy, and paste do not work. Instead of getting more hotkeys for things I use all the time, like "Amplify" and "Measure RMS," I got keyboard shortcut non-functionality. I have tried shutting it down and restarting without any change. Now, perhaps if I take the time to go in and specifically program those as hotkeys, they might work--but why in the world would I waste that time when there is no guarantee they will work all the time every time if I do it?
The transfer into Audacity 4 also made my soundtrack do weird things. It added pops and made this odd loud/soft/loud alteration that was all within my RMS goals, but sounded off to me. I don't want to go back and mess with this, which I estimate would take an additional 80 hours of work per chapter.
Recording and rerecording were also painful. When I record over something, the original does not have to be silenced, but it records in a separate clip directly over the top of where you want it. Instead of stopping as soon as you get to the end of the area where you can record, it then begins recording over things you do not want to lose. Getting rid of these recordings is something I haven't figured out how to do. Twice now, I have clicked ctrl-z to undo something and ended up with a black screen--my entire project is erased. This means I get to (1) start over or (2) close without saving and go back to my last save point. Then there was the fact that prior versions only let me record new at the end of a clip or after highlighting a center part of the clip. Now, I have found myself recording at the beginning of a clip when I did not want to and was originally working on the end. I have no clue why it jumped to the beginning before I hit record, but I lost data because it now records over everything, and I had to rerecord 20 minutes of audio to fix it because it got so messed up.
I can no longer copy and paste silence. Now, I have to click into the Generate menu and click "Silence." Then I have to adjust how much silence- in other words, something that was once easy to execute through a couple of quick keyboard hotkey commands has now become a time-consuming process.
I used to be able to highlight a section and listen only to that section--no more. The section keeps playing. This is extremely irritating because if I am listening for something specific and I want to see if it is in the highlighted section, I now have to make sure to stop the recording from continuing. I also can't tell if something is in that section when they are short because the playback continues outside the box, and I am too slow to stop it. I have to have my attention divided between listening to what I am looking for and stopping it where I want.
There are a lot of positive reviews of Audacity 4 online, but I can't understand it. All the safety mechanisms to keep you from accidentally screwing up your work are gone. All the hotkey commands that made working quicker are nonfunctional. And, you have the chance of randomly losing all your work completely. I don't have time to screw around with learning this or waiting for an update to fix things. Don't make my mistake and upgrade.
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