I need Audacity on my RL 9.4 system. They distribute it ONLY as an Appimage. For sometime it worked fine, but one day, a couple months ago, after installing a few RL updates, Audacity refused to start. I asked in several places (including, I am sure, in these RL forums) and got no useful replies.
So, this week when they released a new major version I downloaded its Appimage, which behaves no better than the earlier ones.
Instead of whining some more I decided to download sources and build my own. Surprisingly, it built with only minor issues to work through. âGreat!â, I thought, once I had installed it and found that yes, it does play back audio files.
But of course all is not well (else why would I be posting this)? I commonly pull recordings from my Zoom DAR and tweak them in Audacity. So I loaded up a .wav file and tried to use many of the ânormalâ effects. Guess what? pretty much all of them die as soon as I click the go button.
So I downloaded the last version from before the version update and as expected it built cleanly (if you donât mind a bunch of compiler warnings) but IT STILL DOESNâT WORK! Dies just like the last one I built.
I suppose I could work my way backwards thru all the versions available to see if ANY of them work, but I am not especially fond of beating my head on concrete.
So, if anyone here uses Audacity on RL 9.4, Iâd appreciate it if you would let me know:
what Audacity version works for you
Is it the Appimage, or did you build it yourself (or whatever other source you used)
I can add a long stream of console output from the version(s) that fail, if anyone may be able to determine the cause from perusing it, just lemme knowâŚ
I have not personally used audacity on Rocky Linux, but I use it on Fedora without any issues, though itâs the flatpak. I would try the flatpak and see if you get the same (or better) results.
The one from epel works, though itâs old. And 3.7.0 appimage I got from audacity web site which wonât even start. Has anyone here tried the flatpak version?
Itâs normal for epel packages to be a bit older; but theyâre designed to properly integrate with el8 and el9, and in most cases still work even when you run dnf upgrade.
The flatpak works fine, to the extent Iâve tested it.
I have one issue, and it isnât with flatpak, but with the way Audacity now works.
I really donât like the blue-on-light blue theme used for the tracks. In 3.6.1/2/3 I found a menu item for configuring that back to the old default, but now I canât find it.
Please donât recommend Flatpaks. By obfuscating the content of the payload, they remove validation of content against signed manifests - ie that thing enterprise linux (and RHL before it) has had for a quarter-century.
The one from EPEL works, according to a reliable source. Iâd strongly recommend
stay on the stable RPM
yum-upgrade without fear
ask for an EPEL update
let the Audacity folks know their flatpaks arenât a good solution
And if audacity is leveraging some this-weekâs-release set of libraries that make it difficult to be used on the Enterprise releases
remind them that compatiblity is a good thing that flatpaks donât make up for
Thatâs all I can recommend. I left the OS Security game because of the âyeah I know itâs really unsafe but my friends said it was coolâ problem. Maybe fedoras will have a newer release available to it, but thatâs a wholly different set of risks (still smaller than flatpaks and debs, though).
