The Audacity Team has announced the release of Audacity 1.3.13 (Beta) for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix. This version now fully supports Windows 7 and contains many bug fixes plus a few new features.

Changes and improvements in Audacity 1.3.13:

• Control Toolbar renamed to Transport Toolbar.
• Device Toolbar (on by default) now contains all input and output device choices, including host and recording channels. Input/output choices are no longer in Mixer Toolbar on Windows XP or some older operating systems. New Transport > Rescan Audio Devices menu item to refresh the device list.
• New "Sync-Lock Tracks" feature (turned on in the Tracks menu) to allow groups of audio and/or label tracks to retain synchronisation when the track length changes.
• Equalization: New "Manage Curves" dialog for importing and exporting curves.
• Noise Removal: New "Sensitivity" slider to adjust the noise threshold, and new option to isolate noise.
• New "Extended Import" Preferences for specifying different importers to open specific file extensions.
• Improved Automatic Crash Recovery with all project changes autosaved.
• MIDI tracks can be vertically zoomed, time shifted and display bar lines. Note: the channel selection buttons are not available in 1.3.13.
• (Windows and Linux) The window Close button and other system close or shutdown commands now quit on closing the last window. File > Close now always clears to a new, empty project.
• (OS X) Simpler installer with top-level "Audacity" folder.

Bug fixes in Audacity 1.3.13

Interface:

• Cutting or copying from a track at a given sample rate into a track at another rate resulted in speed-changed audio.
• Generating inside a clip could modify the clip length or create spurious clips.
• Recorded stereo tracks were only half the height of imported or generated stereo tracks. Imported stereo files had a "1" appended to the track name.
• Edit > Region Save did not save the cursor position.
• (Windows) Projects crashed when clicking rapidly inside the interface or when applying repeated effects towards the end of audio tracks.
• (Windows) Some Unicode characters could not be typed into labels,or caused a freeze using some input methods.
• (OS X) Crash when quitting an empty project window, or when closing the main project window while a progress dialog was on screen.
• Numerous other interface fixes including Dependencies dialog, Keyboard Preferences and spurious lines drawn on waveform.

Imports and Exports:

• Support added for later versions of the optional FFmpeg library up to current FFmpeg HEAD. This should significantly improve FFmpeg support on Linux. FFmpeg downloads for Windows and Mac updated to v0.6. This fixes mono AAC files importing as stereo, though current 0.5 versions of FFmpeg will still work.
• Both FFmpeg and LAME should now be properly detected even when other versions of those libraries exist on the system.
• New warning (on by default) for importing uncompressed audio files. Better error messages when read-directly uncompressed files are missing.
• Imported ID3v2 metadata tags were removed when exporting without the Metadata Editor appearing (for example, when using an export command in Chains). Note: As a result of this fix, ID3v1 tags must now be written by exporting using (external program) and an installed LAME.
• U-Law/A-Law files with WAV headers now use the standard 18 byte fmt chunk, so should now be recognised by most telephony applications.
• Variable bit rate MP3s exported using "MP3 Files" were larger than necessary because using the bit reservoir was disabled.
• (OS X) Files imported from iTunes could create invalid characters in the.aup project file, causing an error when re-opening the project. Note: An error "reference to invalid character number" will still occur if re-opening a project created in previous Betas that contains such characters. To fix the issue, open a back-up copy of the.aup file in a text editor, turn off word wrap, then in the line indicated in the error message, remove the string of characters that starts with &# and ends with a semi-colon (;).

Other bug fixes:

• Nyquist effects: fixes for crashes, incorrect slider behaviour and better support for backslashes, double quotes and Unicode characters.
• (Windows and OS X) Processing of VST effects was substantially slower than in previous versions of Audacity.
• (OS X 10.5 PPC) A first-time installation of Audacity Beta would hang on launch if VST effects were detected.
• (Linux) Recordings made with the pulse device crashed or stalled when using overdub and/or software playthrough.
• (Linux) Play-at-Speed crashed at 0.08 speed or lower if Audacity was configured with libsamplerate.