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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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
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.
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.
I kinda don’t like that logo
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.
I mostly just think they should’ve kept the color scheme from the original.
i think they should have removed the line on top of the logo and it would look better.
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.
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
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 literal fascists?
Minimalism is not postmodernist, you doofus.
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.
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.
easy there big guy. it’s just a fuckin music app
I’ll latch onto any occasion to cry about the utter travesty of minimalist design.
The beauty is, even on Microslop OS, You can just change the icon. To whatever you want.
But that won’t change it for YOU, only for ME!
Get over yourself
I’d never do such a thing, bitch I’m fabulous
The audacity you have to say that!
nice pun
Hah thanks!
yw
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.
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.
Cool Edit Pro was not freeware unless you pirated it.
Pro was not, but the earlier versions were technically crippleware. It was distributed freely with magazines and what not. There was no actual cripple though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware Quite a lot of shareware trusted regular users to voluntarily pay for a licence.
I paid my share by sharing.
I’m sure we all did and that’s why the developer decided to sell to Adobe so they could pay their bills.
Don’t use that spyware-riddled crap. Use Tenacity instead.
All data collection are not even implemeted due to community backlash…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
