- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
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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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 The current one on Flathub is outdated and requires lots of permissions because they couldn’t figure out xdg portals.
Looks incredible!
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
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
same
Tenacity >>>>
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 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
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
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
Does anyone actually like websites that mess with scrolling like that?
I do. It looks neat. Note that I am a hobbyist web dev and I automatically like all shiny web stuff :)
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.
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
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I guess some people consider it cool. I’m not one of them.
Page up/down works just fine.
Not on a phone they don’t.
DarkAudacity ftw!
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?
So opt in plugin support, and some commit comments? Not even actual code?
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.
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.
watched the video on this earlier… many of the things they list as new features have been in most audio software for a quarter of a century. up til now id rather hand someone $60 to buy reaper than recommend this thing, but it’s catching up fast much like freecad has been doing lately
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 still*(edit, mistype) 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.
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.
Good
