Does Audacity contain any spyware, malware or adware? No, if you always download Audacity from our website https://audacityteam.org. ... Nonetheless, virus checkers can occasionally report false positives for the Audacity installer for Windows (.exe). This can happen because Audacity uses a compressed installer.

Dropouts may be caused by a disk drive that cannot keep up with the recording. ... When this setting is "on" (default setting) Audacity will detect dropouts (brief gaps in the recording) and will insert zeroes into the recording to keep the other good parts synchronized.

The software patent on LAME encoding library has expired, so now the LAME library for MP3 export is built-in with Audacity for Windows and Mac. Linux users will still need to download and install the free and recommended LAME third-party encoder to export MP3 files from Audacity.

Click Effect > Repair to replace the selected audio with the repaired audio. Zoom back out (or grab the handle on the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the screen and drag leftwards), click a few seconds before the region you were repairing, and play from there to hear if the repair sounds OK.