Upgrading Audacity to 1.3.5

I have encountered serious difficulties with sound and sound editing on my Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) machine. I’ve blogged about it before, and how I kept using Audacity on my Gutsy machine and even did some editing under Windows to produce my podcast.

I’ve had moments with the Hardy machine, but it was hard to extend those into long enough periods of time with everything working to complete mixing the files for the podcast. Changing a track from stereo to mono would result in Audacity unceremoniously closing. Often I couldn’t either play or record, though usually I could do one or the other. Playing around with the preferences and devices would get things working, but that was annoying.

So I took my life in my hands and upgraded from 1.3.4 to 1.3.5, even though the Ubuntu repositories don’t have it yet. That’s supposed to be a pretty unstable version.

The result is that everything seems to work just fine. I had no difficulties with any phase of producing the podcast this morning. No crashes. No failures to record or play.

I took a decidedly unorthodox route to the update. I went to the debian repositories to get the build, and instead of installing the debian from the file (there were dependency issues), I added the debian repository to my Synaptic Package Manager and then upgraded Audacity. I found that I had to remove the repository again, because it immediately said I had 1007 packages to upgrade, all of which were from that same repository.

I may find that this is dangerous, but I’m willing to work with it considering how well my sound is working at this point. I’ll update here if anything more comes of it. Try the thing with the package manager at your own risk. I truly don’t know what potential pitfalls might come of it, though I can’t think of any off hand.