Audacity ® | Audacity 4
www.audacityteam.org
Flagship tour of what's new in Audacity 4.

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.

  • orenj [he/they]@leminal.spaceEnglish
    17·
    6 days ago

    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

    • Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      241·
      6 days ago

      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

    • BilSabab@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      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

      • Kangae_Hishiryo@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
        101·
        6 days ago

        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:

        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.

  • reka@lemmy.worldEnglish
    232·
    7 days ago

    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.

      • Mwa@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        i think they should have removed the line on top of the logo and it would look better.

        • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3·
          6 days ago

          That’s what makes it look like headphones.

          Or is supposed to. It doesn’t really look like headphones any more. It’s one part knobs, one part volume label (the top shape), and one part pacman screaming at a giant pill.

          • Mwa@thelemmy.clubEnglish
            1·
            6 days ago

            my proposal would make it look like a person listening to a speaker
            it currently looks like my proposal but with a line above a person and the speaker

    • kunaltyagi@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      7 days ago

      I complained to the maintainer about this a year ago. Ofc, they are free to ignore my complaints but ppl not liking the logo redesign is not news to them

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      31·
      6 days ago

      I outright hate it. For all of Tantacrul’s plugging on about design, he really dropped the ball, split his pants bending over for it.

      Yeah the older logo may have looked dated, but I think what I would have done is get rid of the yellow glow behind the waveform and flattened a blue headset with a red wave between, not whatever liberal arts major bullshit this is.

    • ddplf@szmer.infoEnglish
      616·
      7 days ago

      What, you don’t like minimaalist slop that’s being shoved up into your ass left and right as part of our post-modernist lackluster culture that’s totally not been invented by the fascism?

        • ddplf@szmer.infoEnglish
          1·
          6 days ago

          It absolutely it, it’s a modernist essence that has never been properly ejected from postmodernism, and as a result, taken it over. Minimalism as a term never under modernism, because there was no need for it, it was just the regularity of it.

          Mininalism is a rotten leaf that remains of the fascist aesthetics that is modernism.

          • [object Object]@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            6 days ago

            it’s a modernist essence that has never been properly ejected from postmodernism

            That’s like saying that the essence of windows wasn’t ejected from a house.

            As for your other claims, you should look into the concept of touching grass, it’s pretty cool. Clears the head wonderfully.

  • wylinka@szmer.infoEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • joelfromaus@aussie.zoneEnglish
    9·
    7 days ago

    About time! I was using an Adobe suite program for podcast editing years ago (Adobe didn’t get my money :P) and switched to Audacity.

    I’d used Audacity fairly regularly for about 15 years and let me tell you; it was jarring how bad it was compared to modern software. I already see some UI/UX improvements that should make it much more user friendly.

    • bstix@feddit.dkEnglish
      5·
      7 days ago

      Back on in 2003 Adobe bought the freeware software called CoolEdit 2.0 and republished it as a paid product as Adobe Audition without changing a god damn thing.

      CoolEdit was too good to be true. It’s only fair that the developers got paid, but I just wish they didn’t have to sell out to Adobe of all companies.

      I hope this 2026 version of Audacity will finally be on level with what we had for free in year 2000.

    • mirisgaiss@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      watched the video on this earlier… many of the things they list as new features have been in most audio software for a quarter of a century. up til now id rather hand someone $60 to buy reaper than recommend this thing, but it’s catching up fast much like freecad has been doing lately

      • joelfromaus@aussie.zoneEnglish
        61·
        7 days ago

        That’s misinformation.

        If the choice is between a new more polished Audacity or something that looks like old Audacity then refer to my earlier comment.

  • username@piefed.zipEnglish
    12·
    4 days ago

    What a coincidence that they change the UI for the first time ever in the age of vibecoding.

  • captain_spicard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      6 days ago

      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?

      • Hildegard (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        32·
        6 days ago

        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.

        • Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          5·
          6 days ago

          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.