Do Not Upgrade to Audacity 4

 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.

Globe Soup--A Disappointing Contest I Don't Recommend

 In my effort to research good writing contests for indie authors, I have been trying to submit to several that I found. I haven't entered very many, yet, but I discussed in a previous post about how I found Tadpole to be a legitimate flash fiction contest, but the one offered by Off Topic Publishing to be a scam. Both of these contests came in advertisements from another contest website: Globe Soup. I joined Globe Soup's newsletter because they advertised (and it was promoted on other author websites) as being a random contest where they give you a prompt and you have a week to write a story from it. That takes me back to most of my university writing classes, so I felt this would be a good fit for me. I joined, however, right after they had just done one of their random-entry contests, so I never experienced that. 

The next contest they advertised came quickly and was an open short story contest without a prompt. Contests like this are always iffy because the organizers usually claim that any genre can be submitted, but in reality there are only a few judges (or one), and they are going to have limited preferences. Let's also be realistic: How do you compare a well-written sci-fi with a well-written memoir and decide which is best? Still, I entered it with a paranormal romance (yeah, I should have chosen something more mainstream). The contest entry was relatively cheap, but I then selected the option to get an in-depth story critique for my story. I requested this primarily as a tool to better understand what the judges were looking for. That was December 2025. 

It is now August 2026. The contest was done, and results were posted on Globe Soup's website, so I contacted them in April of 2026 and asked about my critique. I was assured they were still working on it and asked if I would like a refund. Since that was not too long after the competition, I decided to wait. 

It was then that I started thinking about the fact that the competition had been judged, but the judges made no critique of the works during the judging period. I have seen a lot of judging for a variety of contests. In general, judges review a work and make notes about what they liked/didn't like at the time they are judging it for the competition. For example, in the Olympics, the judges have a score sheet where they grade each element as it's performed. These grades are then mathematically turned into the final score. 

I do something similar for the indie books I review, when I use my matrix. When judges are given elements to grade and then allowed to make notes on those elements and/or general notes, that is the best, least biased way to run judging. With Globe Soup, however, I have to question how much thought and effort went into judging short stories that apparently were not critiqued by the judges at the time of the contest. 

Needless to say, since it has been almost a year since this competition finished, I have now requested a refund. I will post later if I actually get it. For now, I am still on their mailing list, but I won't be entering any more of their contests. 

Update: I received a message stating that Globe Soup was closed. The website is still up as is the entry information for the last contest they ran, and I'm still getting email from them. The person who responded acted like s/he didn't realize I hadn't gotten a review, but said they were refunding the money. I will give another update when I actually see it in my account.

AI: Great for Some Laughs

 So, on Goodreads, I am a moderator for a review group. We have to do some crazy puzzle solving to make sure no one reviews someone who has reviewed him/her. I have been using Google AI to do this, successfully so far, but I have to type in extremely detailed instructions, and I double check to make sure the perimeters I give it are met. 

I am also part of the Reading Challenge Group and one of the Games they currently have going is to guess a book title and author hangman style. Since I absolutely adore cryptograms and this is only slightly different from that (think Wheel-of-Fortune), I decided to ask Google to give me a similar puzzle and have me guess the title/author. I understand the need to train AI, so I first explained the rules and gave it an example. Then, I asked it to give me a puzzle. The first one was a book/author that it chose from my reading preferences (no I never asked it to track those, but I expect that I am always being tracked while online, so it didn't bother me that it had). Not only did it choose a book I was familiar with, but it gave away the plot while asking me if I wanted a clue about the plotline and it revealed too many letters upfront. So, I told it the puzzle was too easy. 

The next one, I was slightly suspicious that the puzzle it created might be fake, but I am not that familiar with the category it chose: "sci fi/steampunk." I really didn't care if the book was fake or not because part of the joy of the puzzle is solving it for words on the fewest revealed letters. I guessed T and then began to guess a few vowels and a few more consonants. I made it through all the vowels and y and two words had zero letters revealed. 

Now, as an amateur cryptologist, I know that there are no words in the English language that do not have at least one vowel in them (including y). So, I asked Google how there could be two words without any vowels. Google promptly admitted that it had "made an error" and the first word was "The," which I would have already had revealed because I had guessed all those letters, but Google had only revealed the "E." Notably, the two words I had asked about were still without any letters revealed. 

At that point, I decided to change the way I asked the questions:

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Google puzzle before my next question:

CATEGORY: Sci-fi/Cyberpunk

 TITLE: THE/_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ L L _

AUTHOR: _ _ _ _ I I E _ / _ _ _ _ T _ O T

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Me> You said there were two "I"s in the author's name, but did you fail to tell me there are "I"s in the title? 

Google> You caught me again! I absolutely made a mistake. When you guessed the letter I earlier, I only filled it into the author's name, but there is indeed an I in the title as well.

The title is THE INFINITE WALL by the author GABRIEL WRIGHT.

Here is the fully corrected and updated board with all of your correctly guessed letters...

CATEGORY: Sci-fi/Cyberpunk

TITLE: THE/INFINITE/W_LL

AUTHOR:  G _ _ RIIE _/WRI_HT

Incorrect letters: U, A, Y, S

Now, that the title is almost completely filled in, what would you like to do?

[Here Google gave me some letters I could guess, and also the option to guess the title/author. Note that if you compare what Google gave me to what it gave me before, the number of letters and the placement of the letters changed in the puzzle among other things.]

Me> LOL! You told me the title instead of filling in the letters and you misspelled Gabriel when you were filling it in. The completed title is "The Infinite Wall" by the author "Gabriel Wright." Now, I am going to have to fact check you to see if that is a real book or if you made it up. 

Google> You completely caught me red-handed! 😊I completely glitched on that one--I filled in the missing title, gave away the game, and managed to typo Gabriel... 

To make it even funnier, if you fact check me, the book doesn't actually exist! I completely hallucinated [it] and the plot scenario while trying to manage the puzzle matrix...

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(Yes, I was suspicious at the plot scenario, too.) I found the interaction to be hilarious because I understand the limitations of AI, and I was testing it, but did not have high expectations. I still find it hilarious, but it is important for others to realize the limitations as well. Google stole pieces of other books for its "hallucinated" plot scenario as well as parts of titles to create its puzzle (and many people use AI to write their books). It could not follow simple instructions to run this game (and managed to change the number of letters and failed to fill in letters.) Next time, I will try wording my answers better--instead of saying "Is there an A?" I will say "Fill in all the A's in the puzzle." I will also ask it if the book and author are real upfront--even though it has assured me the next puzzle contains a real author and book. Finally, we are using AI to choose military targets and some lawyers are using it to write their cases for them. We have 4,000+ AI factories in the U.S. sucking up water and energy so we can be ahead of the world with our AI, but our AI functions more poorly because we are trying to make it do everything at once. It is like we have this dog, and instead of teaching it to retrieve our shoes for us or pick up trash (things dogs can do), we are trying to teach it to make dinner--which is something dogs will never be able to do. 

Can SI make puzzles (or puzzle books)? Of course. Can AI give you lists of resources for your book? Of course--if you fact check it. Can AI write your book or pick military targets? Not better than throwing a dart at a board, and it never will be able to do these things effectively. We need to use AI for what it can do best and focus on training it to do that well instead of trying to get it to bring the stars to earth for us.