Audacity 2.3.2 on Catalina

Thank you for the feedback. This is the info I found:

https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=107162

n early October Apple released its latest operating system 10.15.x known as Catalina.

Audacity is not officially supported yet to run under Catalina. It appears to launch and run fine but it fails to record from the microphone (or external USB device) yielding only a flat-line silent recording. This is a permissions issue regarding access to the microphone (recording input) and something which we need to explore further.

Fortunately there is a workaround ...

if you have updated to Catalina and still need to use Audacity for recording as well as all its other functionality:

1) Go to Applications > Utilities

2) Launch Terminal.app

3) in the Terminal dialog type the following command following command:

open /Applications/Audacity.app/Contents/MacOS/Audacity

This will open Audacity and then Terminal will actually ask for the correct permissions.

this assume that Audacity is stored in your Applications folder. If it is somewhere else, you will need to change the path in the above command:

open /*location of audacity*/Audacity.app/Contents/MacOS/Audacity

When you first try to record, you will be asked to grant access to the microphone - similar happened in 1.14 Mojave - but microphone access permissions granted in Mojave do not pass through to Catalina. Once you have granted this access in Catalina you should not be asked for it again when relaunching Audacity with this workaround method.

If you leave Audacity active (black dot) in the bottom dock you can just relaunch from the Audacity logo.

If you totally quit Audacity you will need to relaunch from the Terminal app again every time.

On Tuesday, May 5, 2020 Audacity issued a release candidate for Audacity 2.4. The release notes state that the Catalina problem, listed as a P1 priority bug, has been fixed. Some may want to try it out.

https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=110655

https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/New_features_in_Audacity_2.4.0

I will tell you that the MBP I just used this on is running macOS 10.15.3 Catalina with Audacity 2.3.3.

The current shell on the machine is /bin/bash.

I've also just posted a link to this thread in a thread that was running a day or so ago:

Q: Audacity – Apple Community

When I have a few minutes I'll see if I can get this communicated to the Audacity folks.

Again, great job. 😃

Hi, ReluctantToChange.

Hey, my friend, thank you so much for sharing this. It's awesome that you took the initiative to research and produce this workaround. I just tried it on a 2012 MacBook Pro running Catalina and I'm pleased to say that it appears to work just as you have described. I look forward to applying this on my 2013 iMac.

Great job! A+ 😎👍🏽

I hope you will share this with the AudacityTeam. It's a more elegant solution than what they have posted.

Again, thank you!