TL;DR this is a huge overhaul of the popular open-source audio editing app. The UI specifically has been the biggest overhaul, making it a lot more modern and friendly to use.
Hopefully, one day, GIMP will get some kind of update like this.
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What a coincidence that they change the UI for the first time ever in the age of vibecoding.
Any chance for this new version to hit Fedora’s repos?
HOW DARE THEY HAVE THE AUDACITY TO DO THIS!!!
Any chance for an official flatpak? The current one on Flathub is outdated and requires lots of permissions because they couldn’t figure out xdg portals.
Looks incredible!
Didnt audacity shit the bed in some spectacular fashion a while back? I could’ve sworn there was some reason i moved to tenacity and it wasnt just a foss boner
in april 2021, they were purchased by MuseScore;
a few weeks later, they announced that they would introduce Google Analytics and Yandex-based “telemetry”. After strong criticism by the community, Muse Group backtracked, emphasized their commitment to the GPL license, dropped their plans to include Google/Yandex tracking, and instead opted for a self-hosted solution for bug reports and update checks. Both can be disabled, and some distributions disable them by default.
that one was a nothingburger imo as it was always opt-in, was never merged, and planned to only be in testing builds
in july they proposed and then backtracked on a baffling new privacy policy and said they had really overzealous lawyers that they somehow mistrusted lawyers doing so “out of an abundance of caution”, which resolves the issue in my books—within two weeks, which is why i’m not absolving them, but it’s been five years since 2021 and absolutely no nonsense has happened.
in fact, audacity has since gained a ton of productivity improvements, outlined in the video https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38 that does have a conflict of interest
tl;dr: i still support audacity
receipts: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/889 , https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/1353, and everything these link
wasn’t it during the previous regime and one of the causes of the takeover? Because I haven’t heard of Audacity for quite a while
Main reason I read posts like this is to learn what the cool kids are using instead. I edit audio like a few times a year so it helps to hear things like this
same
I successfully use Ardour 9 for music production.
Good
I worry this will be like musescore 4.
It’s the same lead designer. I thought the reception to the changes done to musescore was positive. Wasn’t it archaic as shit before?
Oh that is concerning. I’ll try it, but hearing that I’ll probably stay with version 3.7, or switch to Tenacity if it adds realtime effects.
Muscore 3 is only archaic according to the lead developer of Musescore 4, and he is rather biased. In my experience it completely broke my workflow and supposedly added a new playback engine that doesn’t seem to exist.
The new playback engine is proprietary; you need to download MuseSounds to use it. It does sound good FWIW and many use MuseScore 4 as a primitive DAW 😬
I personally enjoyed the UX and engraving changes. Said designer also introduced draggable sound clips to Audacity 3 so I trust him on design.
I don’t know if they’re having an issue with the flatpak version or something but the UI feels broken, elements don’t line up and the text looks unusually small for the buttons. It also has problems with running a dark version, some UI elements are still white.
Switched to Tenacity. Works good enough for me.
The Flatpak version is still stuck on Audacity 3, it hasn’t been updated in months.
DarkAudacity ftw!
Tenacity >>>>
It’s that an alternative?
Is a hard-fork that happened after the Audacity’s corporate, astroturf, and anti-user shift.
This is a direct quote of their Codeberg repo:
Motivation
Our project initially started as a fork of Audacity as a result of multiple controversies and public relation crises, which you can find out more about here:
- Privacy policy which may violate the original project’s GPL license
- Contributor’s License Agreement (CLA) which may violate the same GPL license
- Attempts at adding telemetry using Google services for data collection
Nevertheless, the goal of this project is to pick up the decades-long work by the original developers of Audacity and create an audio editor that is fresh, more modern, convenient and practical to use, with the help and the guidance of our users and our community.
Differences from Audacity
Tenacity is not merely an Audacity fork that removes error reporting and update checking, although it might seem like it. We have been hard at work implementing our own features and fixes and want to take Tenacity in a direction our users and community like. So far, we have fulfilled part of this endless goal by implementing the following:
- New, modern themes.
- Improved support for more platforms such as Haiku.
- Matroska importing and exporting without needing FFmpeg.
- Support for importing, editing, exporting Matroska chapters as label tracks.
- Sync-lock improvements, including the ability to temporarily override sync-lock.
- Horizontal scrolling in the Frequency Analysis window.
- Under-the-hood changes, such as a revamped build system allowing for modern upstream dependencies.
More changes are yet to come, big or small. We are always welcoming contributions to Tenacity, no matter how big or small, feature or fix. For more info, see the Contributing section.
I’m trying to figure out which model they used based on the style of the UI, but I can’t quite pin it down.
Omg they had the audacity to change the UI!
Wow. Tech and a dad joke joke.
👏😂
As one of the most iconic consumer software FOSS projects this is enormous. Huge congrats to the team who picked this up in the last couple of years.
Or just use Reaper instead
Audacity isn’t a DAW, it’s an audio editor which makes it very different from Reaper.
True, but you could argue that supporting VST plugins, which audacity does, makes you some kind of a DAW. As for the editing (stems, clips etc) Reaper works on a very similar way and is pretty lightweight too. To each his own 😊
Audacity is like a tape recording studio. It doesn’t support midi programming and VSTi as far as I know.
Everything is a DAW if you’re brave enough, and there’s no strict definition, but for something to be a full DAW, it should have both recording and virtual instruments IMO.
As of now, there’s very few free ones that does both and Reaper beats all of them as the cheapest paid option. However Reaper doesn’t do everything. Some paid DAWs still have features that Reaper doesn’t.
