Audacity 4.0.2 ships as a bug-fix patch, prioritizing corrupted projects and crashes
The November 2 update for the free audio editor targets the crashes and data-loss bugs that followed its ambitious 4.0 rewrite.
After a rough launch, Audacity 4.0.2 is out, and its main job is making sure your projects survive. Released November 2, this patch build trades fresh features for a pile of fixes aimed at data corruption, crashes, and the loss of autosave. Three things you really don't want to lose mid-session.
The release notes say it plainly. "While we work hard to add new features and bring back missing ones in the upcoming 4.1, this patch release fixes many crashes and project corruption issues," Muse Group wrote. The reality is damage control. The real product is coming later.
What 4.0.2 actually fixes
The patch does most of its work on data integrity. That is the kind of bug that makes people pull their hair out. Two fixes, both logged under #12436, cover corruption when copying audio between projects and the loss of pitch or clips when moving them across tracks with different sample rates. #12544 handles corruption when a project contains empty clips, while #12123 cleans up duplicate .aup4 extensions and "Save As" errors when replacing an existing project.
Several crashes are gone too. #12569 stops one on projects with sample snapping enabled, #12573 handles "Repeat Last Effect" after a project closes, and #12595 deals with the Split shortcut when it has not been customized.
Two functional comebacks are worth flagging. #12539 restores autosave during recording, and #12570 brings back trim, clear selection, and zoom shortcuts while adding Page Up and Page Down timeline scrolling. On top of that, smaller corrections cover metadata fields, NTSC frame snapping, label linking, and a Linux import bug.
Two external contributors earned credit here. jonata fixed the Linux File > Import issue that returned no files (muse_framework#365), and xphenomenon sorted out CJK character handling during text trimming (muse_framework#357). The build itself was posted to GitHub by kryksyh, which is a useful reminder that this project still leans heavily on volunteer patches.
Head here to download the release from GitHub.
