Audacity, the best open-source audio editor, has reached version 2.1.0 today, March 29, a major release that brings a great number of new features and improvements over the previous stable release. While there’s no official announcement on the project’s homepage at the moment of writing this article, we can tell you what exactly has been changed since Audacity 2.0.6.

Audacity 2.1.0 brings dozens of improvements to the built-in effects. For example, it adds real-time preview support (latency compensation not supported), saving of effects settings across sessions, as well as saving and loading of user presents in the VST, LADSPA, and Audio Unit (OS X only) effects. FXB present banks can now be imported and exported from VST effects, and the Noise Removal effect has been improved, renamed to Noise Reduction.

Furthermore, support for shell VST effects that can host multiple plugins has been implemented, all the items from the Effect menu can now be used in a Chain, users will be able to sort or group the items in the Analyze, Effect, and Generate menus by class of effect, name, or publisher, new time controls have been added to the Change Speed effect, and a Preview button has been added to the Nyquist Prompt and other Nyquist effects.

A new effect has been added as well in Audacity 2.1.0, called "Crossfade Tracks" and designed to be used for crossfading two audio tracks. The "Crossfade Tracks" effect has been created from the ground up as a drop-in replacement for the existing Cross Fade in and Cross Fade Out effects.

The User Interface (UI) has been improved and new OSes are supported

Audacity 2.1.0 comes now with a revamped User Interface (UI) that includes redesigned Meter Toolbars, supports creation of frequency selections to which spectral edit effects can be applied directly from the spectrogram view, support for loop playback and cut-preview has been implemented in the Transcription Toolbar (Play-at-speed), and an Armenian translation has been added. Keyboard shortcuts are not visible in the Audacity menus when using the application under Ubuntu Linux with the Unity user interface, but a workaround exists.

The latest version of Audacity is now supported on a wide range of computer operating systems, including all Microsoft Windows versions (XP SP3 (32-bit), XP SP2 (64-bit), Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1), and Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite. The application is also compatible with Apple Audio Units and has been compiled with Visual Studio 2013. Numerous bugs have been squashed for all platforms, so you should check out the full changelog. Download Audacity 2.1.0 for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows right now from Softpedia.