Audacity 4’s first public beta arrived this month with the biggest design change the iconic open-source audio editor has seen in decades.

The audio editor’s interface, built on wxWidgets since the project began, now runs in Qt. However, the audio engine which handles file I/O, project storage and the built-in effects, uses the older codebase, wired up to the new frontend via a module called au3wrap.

In a sense, Audacity 4 is a new look atop the same core engine, although the Github changelog choose to frame it as a “ground-up rewrite” in Qt, that appears to be only relate to the UI.

Either the, the new look (and its new logo) will go a long way to addressing jibes that the Audacity looks dated.

Beyond visual changes, there are plenty of new and improved features to check out.

A redesigned envelope tool handles gain curves with drag-and-reshape controls; spectral editing lets you select frequency regions in the spectrogram directly to apply effects to a specific band; and a new metadata editor handles track title, artist, etc tags before export.

Lead-in recording also makes it debut (previously known as punch and roll). This lets you record over a section of audio without affecting whatever comes after it.

Working on multiple projects? They can now stay open at once, and you can copy clips between them. Nyquist and VST3 plugins are supported across all platforms, with AudioUnits on macOS and LV2 on Linux.

There’s also built-in cloud saving via Audio.com (and it WILL nag you about this unless you disable the welcome dialog), some new layout options (new or more Audacity 3.x-a-like, coloured clips), and a new dashboard for managing projects.

As a beta there’s no assurance of stability. I encountered a number of crashes just messing around to take screenshots. But the broad strokes are there, and they are looking good.

What about Audacity 3.x compatibility?

Per the website, you can open Audacity 3 project files in Audacity 4, with clips, tracks and labels carried across intact. There’s no indication on whether things work in reverse; given how much has changed, it’s safer to assume Audacity 4 projects won’t open in 3.x.

Some Audacity 3.x features don’t make the cut in 4.0 beta 2. Tempo tracks, LADSPA plugins and Vamp analysers are gone and there’s no word (yet) if they’ll be back before the stable release. If you need ’em, stay on the 3.x branch as it’s stable and maintained.

On that note, Audacity 3.7.8 was released alongside the 4.0 public beta. It fixes among other things, multichannel FLAC file importing and ensures presets load again in the Distortion effect. On Linux, the wxGTK interface is also now said to look better on HiDPI displays.

Can I test Audacity 4.0 beta?

You can download Audacity 4.0.0 beta 2 for Windows, macOS and Linux from the Audacity.com/next web page or head to the project GitHub. For the latter, there’s an Intel/AMD 64-bit AppImage to try, but no ARM64 build (yet; there’s one for Windows).

Do back up your projects before testing this. It’s a beta and the Audacity developers are clear that this build isn’t ready for anything you can’t afford to lose.