Is audacity still bad and sending information to Russian servers or something?

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.

codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity

This is the way.

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

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.

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.

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 nyan@lemmy.cafe 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 apologize for phrasing things so poorly that several people seem to have missed my actual point, which was: no one else with an auto-update feature requires any information about you, therefore if they claim that’s their reason for asking for users’ personal information, they’re lying. They may have other reasons, which they have not stated. They may even be good reasons, although I’m not holding my breath.

And yes, I have compiled my own copy with that nonsense switched off, thanks for asking. However, it’s the job of people who understand that this is overreach to push back against it on behalf of the people who lack the knowledge, time, or energy to investigate it. I don’t like throwing even Windows users under the bus.

Nobody misunderstands you. You’re just *wrong*. An auto-update system, *by definition*, requires you send a request to their server. That gives them access to your IP address, which potentially gives them information including your location.

Most Audacity users use Windows.

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?

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.

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.

Audacity is where you edit samples or record stems. A DAW is where you then use those samples and stems.

It’s much better than mspaint now but still as snappy. I think they removed overwriting the track while recording, though.

Whaaat, I did not know about this. Thanks for illuminating me. From the context in these comments, that’s pretty crazy

Does anyone actually like websites that mess with scrolling like that?

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.

Page up/down works just fine.

Not on a phone they don’t.

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

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 pace god damn it

NO. Especially on mobile, it really sucks

When it’s badly made, like this, yeah. A recent example that I did like is the website for the Dragons Dogma 2 expansion:
www.dragonsdogma.com/2da/en-us/

I do. It looks neat. Note that I am a hobbyist web dev and I automatically like all shiny web stuff :)

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?

Looks like they took some cues from Dark Audacity. A dark theme is nice, but when Audacity first started adding telemetry shit I took Dark Audacity for a spin and hated more or less every UI "improvement." Lots of extra menu diving to access important, heavily used features DA decided was "clutter." Tenacity has some bugs but it's served me very well since otherwise

yeah, I feel like a poser not being able to get tenacity to work properly on my computer

I guess you don’t have enough… :puts on sunglasses:… Tenacity

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

*the who starts playing backwards*

EDIT : more like puts on sunglasses over existing sunglasses.

EDIT2 : Gotta post that comic on !antiquememesroadshow@lemmy.world

EDIT 3 :

lemmy.world/post/51501419
www.biggercheese.com/index.php?comic=701

tenacity ftw

Why?

An Audacity fork without telemetry

Also, their website actually works.

8( )

Also -->

“For discussions regarding all things Tenacity, you can head on over to our Lemmy community.”

programming.dev/c/tenacity

PS. Glad to find this post, my first time hearing about tenacity fork!

:O

Audacity has no telemetry, unless opt-out update checking counts.

No AI.

:o

[Hits “Zap style sheets” bookmarklet to make it possible to get at least a minimal amount of information out of the page]

Ugh, they still actually think the cloud shite is a feature.

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? Did they do some sort of LLM integration or use LLM-spewed code?

Yes

• www.audacityteam.org/blog/openvino-mac/
• github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/10296#pullreque…
• github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/10674#issueco…

Source: codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware

So opt in plugin support, and some commit comments? Not even actual code?

What does 3.x/4.0 have to do with that? That was 3.x, and local too.

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?

What AI?

……holy shit, this is massively different from the last time I used this. This would be bigger for those who have iPads for podcasts

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.

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.

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.

Based on?

Just the state of software at large, cynically.

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 ball earmuff and you get an (admittedly large and spiky) non-erect cock.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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

I kinda don’t like that logo

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?

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

Installed it once and was immediately out of my depth. Closed it and went right back to audacity for my simple edits. Maybe one day I’ll invest time to learn. Do you have any recommended resources?

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.

Omg they had the audacity to change the UI!

Wow. Tech and a dad joke joke.

👏😂

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.

It’s not AI generated.

There is literally a dev log.

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 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.

Good

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

I successfully use Ardour 9 for music production.

I’ll have a look, thanks!

same

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 youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38 that does have a conflict of interest

tl;dr: i still support audacity

receipts: github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/889 , github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/1353, and everything these link

Looks incredible!

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.

HOW DARE THEY HAVE THE AUDACITY TO DO THIS!!!

Does this mean all of my 3.x projects will no longer work?

Any chance for this new version to hit Fedora’s repos?

What a coincidence that they change the UI for the first time ever in the age of vibecoding.