Hi,
Running a nightly build, particularly near the time of a new release,
will probably work pretty well and can be advantageous both because you
can take advantage of the new features and because you have a better
chance of getting accessibility problems fixed in the new release.
However, you may not want to install a nightly for fear that it might
trash your current installation. Here's how I set up a nightly build so
that I have my environment but don't trash my production installation.
The "nightly" builds are here <http://gaclrecords.org.uk/win-nightly/>.
You can use a nightly without affecting your 2.1.2 installation:
* Unpack the zip file somewhere. Its contents are contained in a
folder named something like audacity-win-rdd836f4-2.1.3-alpha-28-jan-17.
* In that folder (which contains audacity.exe), make a folder called
Portable Settings. This will cause Audacity to place its
configuration files here instead of overwriting the ones for your
normal installation.
* Run audacity.exe to start the program.
It's simplest to leave Portable Settings empty and let Audacity make its
config files, but if you have configurations, key assignments, plug-ins
etc. that you want, you can copy the contents of %appdata%\Audacity into
Portable Settings. You should close any running Audacity windows before
you do this, but if you don't, when you start the new Audacity it will
try to recover the project you had open. You also probably don't want
to copy the Plug-Ins folder, even if you have installed additional
plug-ins. The copy of audacity.cfg will give you your preferences,
including custom key assignments. If you don't have extra plugins, you
might not want to copy pluginregistry.cfg, and pluginsettings.cfg, so
you will end up with just the plug-ins included in the new release. If
you do copy these files, you will notice that many Effects, Generators,
and Analyzers menu entries are submenus containing several entries, one
for each version you had plus the ones from the new build. If this
happens, you can get them out of your way by:
* go to Effects > Add / Remove Plug-ins...
* Select the Show enabled radio button.
* Go through the list of plug-ins and press SPACE on every entry you
don't want. I disable everything from other locations unless the
current version doesn't have the plug-in. This makes sure that you
are using the new stuff.
* Press ENTER to close the dialog.
It will speed things up a little if you notice the characters in the
name of the build folder that follow "win-" that you are setting up so
you don't have to listen to the whole path to know where this entry lives.
The nightlies don't come with the help file, so you might want to open
Preferences (Control+p), press "i" until you get to Interface, press
ALT+m to move to Display Location of Manual, and choose From Internet.
Then press ENTER to close the dialog.
One of the things I have observed is that sometimes when the Preferences
dialog opens or closes, the focus is on the top-level window instead of
the tree view. When the dialog opens JAWS may say "Audacity not
responding", wait a while, and then eventually say "track view table".
(I don't remember if it says "Audacity not responding" when focus moves
to the tree view-- it hasn't happened recently!) When this happens you
can try clicking somewhere in the window. When exiting the dialog this
happens more often when pressing ESC than ENTER. If there are no tracks
in the project, you may have to click on something that is there, like
Project Rate in the Selection bar and then go back to the track panel.
Hope that helps.
Gary
