I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch!
Yes, Tantacrul. Pretty weird story, a composer and programmer who absolutely roasted the UIs of well known sheet music dinosaurs Finale and Sibelius in hilarious diss videos on YouTube. Then he conceded a bit reluctantly that Musescore was the better of the lot, but still had plenty of opinions on how it could be better.
So the guitar tabs website which had then recently acquired Musescore offered him a job. Not just a job, but basically to be boss of the whole thing. Then they bought audacity, staffpad and Hal Leonard too. Then they bought out their private equity backer.
I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up. They haven't enshittified it (from my perspective as a user anyway). It seems in the end these people just loved music more than they loved money.
> I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up.
Just remember bad news sells. I'm reasonably sure there are a number of other cases where this happens, likely most. However they are not big news and not memorable so I can't cite them.
If it happens all the time and it's positive, you shouldn't need a news story to confirm it. People should just be able to think of examples.
Certainly I'm able to think of plenty of terrible results from private equity take-overs from my own personal experience as an employee or as a customer.
I have used old audacity and musescore-owned audacity, and I have to say it's a massive glow-up.
I use REAPER for most things, but audacity has found a nice little niche when it comes to recording voice clips because it just does it with less hassle.
I have been using Audacity 3 for making music with samples for a few years. And it sort of worked, but there were a lot of things that were inconvenient, like the project sometimes not saving, or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip.
I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them.
> or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip
Are you sure this isn't just the typical "clip/crop a sample at the wrong moment, in the middle of a soundwave, and you'll get a pop/click"? This problem happens all across DAWs and hardware samplers and such, usually there is a way to "align to zero-crossings" when you wanna avoid it, or called something similar. I'd be surprised if Audacity didn't have that optionally since before, or that they didn't have it before but now with Audacity 4 it would suddenly be used automatically, that'd be somewhat strange too.
I think you're right. Audacity does have a "zero-crossings" thing, but when I tried using it a long time ago, it didn't seem to work, and I just learned to do fade-in/out for everything. Maybe I did something incorrectly.
I just started the appimage - it asks you to login to the "cloud" but also offers a prominent skip button, and then asks if you want a telemetry UUID or not.
Just an educated guess, but perhaps there are optional dependencies missing in the arm64 version. Some programs are still broken or perform badly on arm64.
>> The following Audacity 3 features are not available in Audacity 4.0, but we're working on adding them in future releases.
Time Tracks
Note/MIDI tracks
Mixer
Macro Manager and the scripting pipe
VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting
Play-at-speed
Sync-Lock and the old tool modes were replaced by the workflows described above.
>>Additionally, Audacity 4 ships with some missing exporting and rendering features, analyzers, and effects.
Looks great. I remember a company sort of bought it but afaict they didn’t monetize it. I don’t remember the strategy, or why it was acquired, does anyone recall it?
It’s the same company that bought MuseScore, they basically plan on monetizing it through plugins, audio samples, or optional cloud services (like MuseScore)
They must have abandoned such plans (if they had any) when they got some backlash after they added telemetry features and half a dozen forks popped up overnight.
Wasn't audacity taken over by a company sniffing for user data, some years ago?
I noted this down into a local .yml file back in 2021, when Muse Group took over and wanted to telemetry-sniff people. I didn't pay attention to audacity past that point.
Also, many accounts on hackernews act very suspiciously, with just raw promo as it if comes from an advertising account. I am noticing this increasingly, where people comment regular news with "this is great!!!!!". That makes no sense.
If anyone here has contributed to Audacity I just want to say thank you. I'm not a power user. I'm not in audio. However, over the years I have installed Audacity to do some audio things here and there. It has always been so useful.
Very disappointed to see a program I remembered fondly for its native-feeling interface and functional, wholegrain feeling turned into whatever this is. It’s akin to a nutrient-rich home cooked meal being replaced with McDonald’s. I should’ve known it was doomed from the moment
I saw an advertisement for their Discord chat room in the readme.
This doesn't feel like very constructive feedback. Have you actually tried 4.0 yet, or were you too put off by the Discord link to proceed?
IMO Audacity has never been particularly native-feeling, and I don't buy the McDonalds analogy - this release is still lightweight. It'd be a fair comment if they'd e.g. move to Electron, but Qt 6 is hardly that.
Yeah, it's sad to see how such a great program was ruined by yet another company. Opened it the other day and was greeted with a welcome screen that advertised some online service, then I had to turn off telemetry and there is some cloud integration now?
open source apps can be insanely powerful (and free!) but a thing that keeps a lot of them from 'mainstream' adoption is simply the F-tier user experience
gimp had the same issue and i wouldnt be surprised if you also miss the old GTK UI?
making audacity feel like a modern app instead of a dusty relic isnt making it into McDonalds..
I for one applaud this upgrade -- its the polish it should have had years ago
I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
This video is simply excellent. Really shows the challenges involved.
His other videos are awesome too. He is an expert in making great software AND a great video creator.
Yes, Tantacrul. Pretty weird story, a composer and programmer who absolutely roasted the UIs of well known sheet music dinosaurs Finale and Sibelius in hilarious diss videos on YouTube. Then he conceded a bit reluctantly that Musescore was the better of the lot, but still had plenty of opinions on how it could be better.
So the guitar tabs website which had then recently acquired Musescore offered him a job. Not just a job, but basically to be boss of the whole thing. Then they bought audacity, staffpad and Hal Leonard too. Then they bought out their private equity backer.
I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up. They haven't enshittified it (from my perspective as a user anyway). It seems in the end these people just loved music more than they loved money.
AFAIK, Francisco Partners was only involved in the Hal Leonard acquisition.
It was more of a partnership regarding Hal Leonard than ownership of Muse.
It seems after the Native Instruments fiasco, they (Francisco Partners) just decided to quit music altogether.
> I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up.
Just remember bad news sells. I'm reasonably sure there are a number of other cases where this happens, likely most. However they are not big news and not memorable so I can't cite them.
If it happens all the time and it's positive, you shouldn't need a news story to confirm it. People should just be able to think of examples.
Certainly I'm able to think of plenty of terrible results from private equity take-overs from my own personal experience as an employee or as a customer.
Beat me to it, I was just about to post this. It's a really cool breakdown of what goes into supporting and modernising such old open source software.
Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM
I usually hate product announce videos but this one is so concise and fast and to the point, I'm very impressed. Also wow the new UI looks delicious!
Yeah, it is a hand-made video! Someone put actual work into it. :-) Results are speaking.
Lost me at QT.
Why do you care so much about the UI framework used?
I have used old audacity and musescore-owned audacity, and I have to say it's a massive glow-up.
I use REAPER for most things, but audacity has found a nice little niche when it comes to recording voice clips because it just does it with less hassle.
It's in good hands.
Whatever happen with the post-telemetry fork debacle projects? Tenacity, Sneedacity, or something...
Someone mentions it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49549040
https://tenacityaudio.org
Seem like they have a few commit every week. 32 Issues closed in a year: https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity/activity/yearly
Looks healthy?
I have been using Audacity 3 for making music with samples for a few years. And it sort of worked, but there were a lot of things that were inconvenient, like the project sometimes not saving, or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip.
I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them.
> or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip
Are you sure this isn't just the typical "clip/crop a sample at the wrong moment, in the middle of a soundwave, and you'll get a pop/click"? This problem happens all across DAWs and hardware samplers and such, usually there is a way to "align to zero-crossings" when you wanna avoid it, or called something similar. I'd be surprised if Audacity didn't have that optionally since before, or that they didn't have it before but now with Audacity 4 it would suddenly be used automatically, that'd be somewhat strange too.
I think you're right. Audacity does have a "zero-crossings" thing, but when I tried using it a long time ago, it didn't seem to work, and I just learned to do fade-in/out for everything. Maybe I did something incorrectly.
[delayed]
How's the telemetry situation nowadays? I haven't been updating my copy for a while.
I just started the appimage - it asks you to login to the "cloud" but also offers a prominent skip button, and then asks if you want a telemetry UUID or not.
So even after the intense backlash Tantacrul saw on the GH threads, they went ahead and stuffed it full of telemetry anyway. Incredible.
He is pro age-verification with government IDs, what do you expect?
in the age of 500MB apps (thanks to electron); it is refreshing to see a sub-50MB app again.
Reaper install is 13 megs. I have no idea how is this possible today.
Now that I look at it, why is the arm64 that much smaller then x86_64?
36 vs 47MB
Just an educated guess, but perhaps there are optional dependencies missing in the arm64 version. Some programs are still broken or perform badly on arm64.
>> The following Audacity 3 features are not available in Audacity 4.0, but we're working on adding them in future releases.
Time Tracks Note/MIDI tracks Mixer Macro Manager and the scripting pipe VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting Play-at-speed Sync-Lock and the old tool modes were replaced by the workflows described above.
>>Additionally, Audacity 4 ships with some missing exporting and rendering features, analyzers, and effects.
LADSPA sounds pretty critical; did they really ship with that missing?
Looks like most of the timeline editing feature could be successfully ported to Kdenlive (FOSS for video-editing)
Love to see a winamp-era software evolving to this beauty. Enveloppes and UI colors looks like ableton in a good way.
As always, abandoning GTK (or libadwaita. ew.) for Qt is a welcome change. Good for them.
It was using wxWidgets, not GTK directly IIRC
Looks great. I remember a company sort of bought it but afaict they didn’t monetize it. I don’t remember the strategy, or why it was acquired, does anyone recall it?
It’s the same company that bought MuseScore, they basically plan on monetizing it through plugins, audio samples, or optional cloud services (like MuseScore)
They must have abandoned such plans (if they had any) when they got some backlash after they added telemetry features and half a dozen forks popped up overnight.
They haven't
Just go the main homepage and there is a banner which leads you to buy the latest plugin
https://www.audacityteam.org/
But hontestly nothing wrong with that imo
> half a dozen forks popped up overnight
There is only one actively maintained fork https://tenacityaudio.org/
I've always loved audacity, but have always found its editing workflow to be hard to use. This seems an improvement.
P.S.: I don't care for looks, but UX seems better. I will try it.
Love what Audacity has become, especially the new UI that does not look like it was forced through some scrum pipeline
Eh? It looks exactly like it was put through a scrum pipeline.
What does that mean?
While I agree tbf it could be much worse
Whoa what a glow up!
Hopefully there will be a selfhostable implementation of their cloud counterpart someday? Maybe only a weekend of vibecoding away.
What features do you need? Cloud saving?
I hope app startup times have been improved, at some this regressed massively, from 0.5s to like 2s.
Audacity and Avidemux have allowed me to look much more skilled in media editing than I have any right to claim
The new editing features will be pretty useful for sound design.
Wasn't audacity taken over by a company sniffing for user data, some years ago?
I noted this down into a local .yml file back in 2021, when Muse Group took over and wanted to telemetry-sniff people. I didn't pay attention to audacity past that point.
Also, many accounts on hackernews act very suspiciously, with just raw promo as it if comes from an advertising account. I am noticing this increasingly, where people comment regular news with "this is great!!!!!". That makes no sense.
AFAIK it was just regular usage telemetry. Audacity asks you on start if you want take part now.
I am sure that Suno would love to buy Audacity.
Why do you think that is?
I imagine the backlash would kill it.
Finally looks great!
It's been many years since I used Audacity but the interface looks vastly improved.
If anyone here has contributed to Audacity I just want to say thank you. I'm not a power user. I'm not in audio. However, over the years I have installed Audacity to do some audio things here and there. It has always been so useful.
I used Audacity decades ago (2006-2010) but when I stopped buying PCs I always found there was noise on a Mac so I switched to logic.
I always thought audacity was great, and still prefer its workflow to slow tools or logic. I haven’t ever tried Reaper however.
Very disappointed to see a program I remembered fondly for its native-feeling interface and functional, wholegrain feeling turned into whatever this is. It’s akin to a nutrient-rich home cooked meal being replaced with McDonald’s. I should’ve known it was doomed from the moment I saw an advertisement for their Discord chat room in the readme.
This doesn't feel like very constructive feedback. Have you actually tried 4.0 yet, or were you too put off by the Discord link to proceed?
IMO Audacity has never been particularly native-feeling, and I don't buy the McDonalds analogy - this release is still lightweight. It'd be a fair comment if they'd e.g. move to Electron, but Qt 6 is hardly that.
Yeah, it's sad to see how such a great program was ruined by yet another company. Opened it the other day and was greeted with a welcome screen that advertised some online service, then I had to turn off telemetry and there is some cloud integration now?
What about the new design do you think is not functional any more compared to version 3?
open source apps can be insanely powerful (and free!) but a thing that keeps a lot of them from 'mainstream' adoption is simply the F-tier user experience
gimp had the same issue and i wouldnt be surprised if you also miss the old GTK UI?
making audacity feel like a modern app instead of a dusty relic isnt making it into McDonalds..
I for one applaud this upgrade -- its the polish it should have had years ago
Ah yes, the native looking interface that doesn't even properly scale on a 4k monitor! Good times!
God forbid someone actually improves a software!