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?
Does anyone actually like websites that mess with scrolling like that?
Marketing consultants and web designers, mostly. It’s a cash cow for them. Companies will inexplicably pay large sums of money for a dynamic website with such ass user experience.
It must look really good in board meetings when they run it on commercial-grade hardware to show their bosses, otherwise I can’t imagine anyone involved has actually tried using those websites.
CEOs and shareholders seem to like them too for some reason. Maybe it bumps up their company valuation or something? Or gives them a reason to give lucrative contracts to their cousin’s brother-in-law’s nephew’s freelance business?
I don’t like it on desktop but goddamn, it sucks even more on mobile. I was swiping to scroll through the stupid horizontal menu and then when I got to the bottom of it, turns out I was scrolling so fast I basically teleported to the bottom of the page.
Page up/down works just fine.
Not on a phone they don’t.
Hate it on desktop, especially with a mouse. On mobile/trackpad it can be ‘ok’, I thought this worked well enough (not laggy or buggy) for me on mobile. But yeah, I do wish this “design” would end, just let me scroll at my own paste god damn it
I automatically assume their ‘ui update’ is bad based on their website alone.
I guess some people consider it cool. I’m not one of them.
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NO. Especially on mobile, it really sucks
I do. It looks neat. Note that I am a hobbyist web dev and I automatically like all shiny web stuff :)
lol they’ve had the same basic interface since I was in high school 20 years ago. This is outstanding. Good for them. I almost never use Audacity anymore but I absolutely would use this if I had a reason to.
I’ll stick with 3.x, since they started using AI in 4.0 - or use Tenacity, of course.
What AI?
What AI? Did they do some sort of LLM integration or use LLM-spewed code?
What does 3.x/4.0 have to do with that? That was 3.x, and local too.
So opt in plugin support, and some commit comments? Not even actual code?
The correct answer to my question based on the links provided would be “no”. They used chatbot code reviews, which is dumb. It does not appear that they used LLM-shitted code or LLM integration. Providing separately downloaded plugins is another thing. Out of those 5 plugins, arguably only one is unethical generative “AI”. One of them is a noise reduction filter, one a music track separation model (which is novel to machine learning afaik), one is voice transcription and the last is upscaling. Do you really think these are so terrible? Are you just against the entire field of machine learning? What specifically is your criticism of these?
Yeah, the AI integration sent it stright to the bin.
What are y’all on about? The only thing I can find happened years ago, uses a plugin that you have to specifically install, is open source, and which runs locally.
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.
GIMP already had a significant update not too long ago. There were UI improvements and things like effects for layers.
There were UI improvements
Barely. It’s the same old terrible UI and needs a complete overhaul.
GIMP’s main issue is the UI issues the majority of people see is the idiosyncratic, well-loved UI it’s most die hard fans would die defending. I swear Adobe astroturf resistance against it being improved…
Nah. Even someone who has never used another editing app would realize the UX is terrible, and it’s harder to do basic things than it should be. There’s too much stuff on screen and the UI looks terrible.
Yeah, for most things, GIMP user interface is absolutely fine.
Most of my mild grumbles about GIMP are not really usability problems, rather just features that would be nice to have. (We got better layer groups now, yesss. Non-destructive plugins are finally within the viewing distance. Yay.) There is stuff that GIMP doesn’t do but competing open source apps do, and while there’s interoperability, it could always be better. (I hear GIMP is finally going to come up with a replacement for xcf files, hope they cooperate with Krita devs and blow the dust off the OpenRaster project.)
The only really aggravating GIMP usability thing is that exporting is very janky (would rather have one single unified export dialog with all the settings), but I assume that’s just a thing because of the way GIMP file plugins have worked in the past.
My main complaint about GIMP is I have attempted to use it about 10 times in the last 20 years and I have never actually understood how to use it. I realise this arguably says more about me than GIMP but I also think I’m in the upper quartile of computer competence and I did an undergraduate module in computer graphics - surely this is it’s #1 issue. But this is where I understand the paradigm of how its UX operates is beyond reproach.
Is audacity still bad and sending information to Russian servers or something?
Surprisingly, the Internet seems to look mostly favourably on Audacity these days. I never really kept up with it at the time, but apparently all the allegedly heinous (mis)features were opt-in. (Further verification of this may be required.)
I can’t tell if that’s the result of a really good scrubbing of bad search results or whether they genuinely cleaned up their act.
Either way, Tenacity, the fork that came about as a result of the controversy, still exists, and apparently has themes to change the look just like Audacity is claiming to have done now, so if you’re uncertain, that’s always an option.
I remember when audacity was pure destructive editing, the mspaint of daws, like not quite notepad and sound recorder, but maybe wordpad. I think I still have a version of that old audacity installer somewhere…
I always kept/keep a full licensed daw for real projects, and then audacity for when I wanted to do a quick edit or recording and didn’t want to boot up the big stuff.
Is it worth getting anymore? Or is it trying to compete with real daws? And if so, is it competitive on the same level?
It’s much better than mspaint now but still as snappy. I think they removed overwriting the track while recording, though.
Audacity isn’t a fully fledged DAW, it’s an audio editor that’s mostly for recording, making quick edits, or fixing up audio. I don’t think it’s really possible to use it in music production yet.
So it’s basically stop the same space? That’s cool, I guess.
I got tired of Tenacity staying stagnant for months, and still having documentation link issues. Meanwhile, Audacity was actually making meaningful improvements.
After diving deeper in the nontroversy, and seeing their in-depth video explaining their design decisions, I concluded that they genuinely want to improve the software and aren’t trying to fuck over the OSS community. So, I switched back when I dumped Windows and switched to Linux.
There’s an extreme black and white view of these kinds of issues that crop up in the community that just pisses me off, and shoddy tech reporting doesn’t help matters. This wasn’t a “Oracle buys MySQL” situation, and the response didn’t deserve a fork. But, hey, it’s free software, and people can fork whatever they want.
It wasn’t about “shoddy tech reporting”. Why would a FOSS audio editing app need to know your country, any personal “Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)”, share it with a wide network of people and potential buyers, as well as their “main office in Russia”? There should be no telemetry of any sort. Any logs kept should be strictly local, which would allow users to send them to the support team voluntarily.
It was to support the auto-update mechanism IIRC. It has to reach out to a server to do that, and the rest of the terms are just legal CYA for what could be possible based on that.
Why would I want an auto-update mechanism in the software? That’s what my distro’s package manager is for. And it doesn’t care who I am or where I’m from. Nor has any other software I’ve encountered with such a useless-to-Linux-users mechanism demanded any information about me.
In short, that rationale is obvious nonsense. That may be why they claim they’re doing it, but it doesn’t hold up.
Indeed, all software maintainers should make their legal decisions on the fact of which OS [email protected] uses.
Yeah it’s a pretty wild mix of paranoia and technical ignorance from both Nyan and Rose here, hey?
If you’re that paranoid and that ideologically “pure”, compile it your fucking self. They made it trivial to remove.
I don’t see how an auto-update feature would need any of those things either. The request is made by the remote user to the Audacity update server. Of course, Linux servers typically keep logs, but that would be one line saying that in order for the app to check for updates or to be updated, an IP address and connection timestamp may end up on the update server.
You really don’t realize that your ip address can tell them which country you’re in? So that they’re obligated to disclose in the terms that they have this info, and that if for some reason police ever come knocking, police would also get this info. Takes all of a minute to think about this.
Also your city and ISP, but that information isn’t mentioned, so it’s evident it wasn’t to catch all. Nothing in the way it’s worded is consistent with your rationale, and the actual policy is significantly more broad. They’re not specifying the information shared with law enforcement would be limited to the IP address or data that can be gathered from it. It’s a completely separate row.
Whaaat, I did not know about this. Thanks for illuminating me. From the context in these comments, that’s pretty crazy
Dang, clicked into the ToU changes in this MR:
Merge pull request ‘Proposal Assembly 2026: ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions’ (#1253) from gedankenstuecke/org:20260629-llm-proposal into main
Like that stance I think
This is the way.
When you start the app for the first time it asks if you want to enable anonymous telemetry, but otherwise I don’t think it sends anything.
Looks incredible!
Hmmm new major version sounds interesting but I hear this one is slopified?
Based on?
Honestly, it’s more likely to be true than not. So at this point, for your doubt, you gotta look for proof that it isn’t.
Based on?
Just the state of software at large, cynically.
That’s not how it works, innocent until proven guilty and all that. Also I’ve followed Tantacrul for a while and he made a video on the product design of the app - don’t recall any mentions of AI.
Yeah he’s been pretty good at documenting development and it’s definitely a human led development process.
……holy shit, this is massively different from the last time I used this. This would be bigger for those who have iPads for podcasts
Maybe I’m being rohrschached but the first thing the new logo reminds me of is cock and balls. In an abstract way.
I don’t quite see it if I’m being honest. I spend a lot of time looking at cocks, so maybe I’m calibrated differently.
Like this:
Adjust the distance between the left and right
ballearmuff and you get an (admittedly large and spiky) non-erect cock.
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
I successfully use Ardour 9 for music production.
same
Good
