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
I successfully use Ardour 9 for music production.
Omg they had the audacity to change the UI!
Wow. Tech and a dad joke joke.
👏😂
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.
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.
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.
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.
DarkAudacity ftw!
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.
Ah right you are, current version 3.7.8. So the UI just breaks by itself! Meh, Tenacity looks great.
I kinda don’t like that logo
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.
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
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
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.
The audacity you have to say that!
nice pun
Hah thanks!
yw
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?
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
It’s an icon on an open source piece of software… Feel free to change it
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.
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.
All data collection are not even implemeted due to community backlash…
Does anyone actually like websites that mess with scrolling like that?
When it’s badly made, like this, yeah. A recent example that I did like is the website for the Dragons Dogma 2 expansion:
https://www.dragonsdogma.com/2da/en-us/NO. Especially on mobile, it really sucks
I automatically assume their ‘ui update’ is bad based on their website alone.
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.
I guess some people consider it cool. I’m not one of them.
Nope. Didnt even work for me lol. Scrolled down for a bit and nothing happened. Gave up on it. I guess I’ll have to read what people think about it, instead of checking it out :D
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
Page up/down works just fine.
Not on a phone they don’t.
Good
I’ll stick with 3.x, since they started using AI in 4.0 - or use Tenacity, of course.
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?
What AI?
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.
tenacity ftw
Why?
An Audacity fork without telemetry
Audacity has no telemetry, unless opt-out update checking counts.
Also -->
“For discussions regarding all things Tenacity, you can head on over to our Lemmy community.”
https://programming.dev/c/tenacity
PS. Glad to find this post, my first time hearing about tenacity fork!
Also, their website actually works.
8( )
:O
No AI.
:o
Is audacity still bad and sending information to Russian servers or something?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Most Audacity users use Windows.
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 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 is where you edit samples or record stems. A DAW is where you then use those samples and stems.
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.
Is it worth getting?
Maybe someone else will have a better answer. I used it once in a blue moon to naively hack at some audio, and will install it or Tenacity to do the same in future as and when the need arises. In fact, I’ll probably end up going for Audacity and a wary eye for telemetry opt-ins because Debian seems to have a native package for it. Tenacity seems to be Flatpak-only.
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.
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.
