Audacity 1.3.4-beta for testers

[Michael Schwendt]

Hi everyone!

Fedora 8, 7 and 6 still contain Audacity 1.3.2-beta. There have been
two new beta releases since then. Sooner or later somebody surely will
open a ticket and use reproachful words when requesting an upgrade to
1.3.4-beta, just because it's newer. So, here's some sort of status
update and the opportunity for the community to help with evaluating
that latest beta release. We, the packagers, appreciate all forms of
success and failure reports as well as feedback sent to the Audacity
developers upstream.

Fedora 8 binaries of Audacity 1.3.4-beta for i386 and x86_64 can be found here:

  http://mschwendt.fedorapeople.org/audacity/

They are not signed, but the directory contains a SHA1SUMs file signed
with my key.

The source of these packages can be found in Fedora Package CVS, of
course, albeit in a separate devel branch. A README file in the
rpms/audacity directory contains a few notes about that branch:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/rpms/audacity/README?rev=1.7&view=markup

The packages were built with wxGTK 2.8.4 as included with Fedora 8 and
no longer with wxGTK 2.6.x. This may result in changes in the GUI.

The packages are NOT built with JACK support, because the PortAudio
v19 audio I/O driver system in Audacity 1.3.4-beta starts the JACK
daemon during initialisation and blocks the ALSA and OSS drivers from
working correctly. There are many errors printed to a terminal. When
built without JACK support, at least one can evaluate the ALSA support
(with or without running Pulse Audio).

Further, as of Audacity 1.3.3-beta, the heavily changed PA v19 driver
system determines inappropriate sample rates, which are rejected by
ALSA, leading to an error dialog until the user chooses a compatible
project rate out of many incompatible ones. This is reason enough to
assume that it breaks in similar ways for other users with different
audio hardware.

Anyway, I'm interested in success and problem reports, and I'm even
more interested in anybody's attempts at reporting problems to the
upstream developers.