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.
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 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.
>> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
His other videos are awesome too. He is an expert in making great software AND a great video creator.
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.
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.
P.S.: I don't care for looks, but UX seems better. I will try it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM
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.
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.
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.
36 vs 47MB
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 always thought audacity was great, and still prefer its workflow to slow tools or logic. I haven’t ever tried Reaper however.
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.
God forbid someone actually improves a software!
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