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.

  • orenj [he/they]@leminal.space
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    1 hour ago

    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

    • BilSabab@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      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

      • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.uk
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        17 minutes ago

        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

  • captain_spicard@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    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.

    • popcar2@piefed.caOP
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      5 hours ago

      The Flatpak version is still stuck on Audacity 3, it hasn’t been updated in months.

  • reka@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    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.

    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      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?

      • Hildegard (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 hours ago

        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.

      • Mwa@thelemmy.club
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        7 hours ago

        i think they should have removed the line on top of the logo and it would look better.

        • frongt@lemmy.zip
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          5 hours ago

          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.

          • Mwa@thelemmy.club
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            4 hours ago

            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

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      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.

    • kunaltyagi@programming.dev
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      9 hours ago

      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

    • ddplf@szmer.info
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      10 hours ago

      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?

    • popcar2@piefed.caOP
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      12 hours ago

      Audacity isn’t a DAW, it’s an audio editor which makes it very different from Reaper.

      • mayst0ne@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        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 😊

        • bstix@feddit.dk
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          12 hours ago

          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.

  • joelfromaus@aussie.zone
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    16 hours ago

    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.

    • bstix@feddit.dk
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      11 hours ago

      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.

  • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    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.

  • redshift@lemmy.zip
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    24 hours ago

    I’ll stick with 3.x, since they started using AI in 4.0 - or use Tenacity, of course.

    • chunes@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      I automatically assume their ‘ui update’ is bad based on their website alone.

    • DrCake@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      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

    • Joelk111@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • Rose@lemmy.zip
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    22 hours ago

    GIMP already had a significant update not too long ago. There were UI improvements and things like effects for layers.

    • popcar2@piefed.caOP
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      12 hours ago

      There were UI improvements

      Barely. It’s the same old terrible UI and needs a complete overhaul.

      • reka@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        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…

        • Rose@slrpnk.net
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          10 hours ago

          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.

          • reka@lemmy.world
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            10 hours ago

            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.

        • popcar2@piefed.caOP
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          11 hours ago

          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.

    • Bilb!@lemmy.ml
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      14 hours ago

      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.