- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.