I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch!
Indirectly related his video on music notation itself, "Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music"[1], is really good IMHO.
> Many people feel that western notation makes it unnecessarily hard to read music. If we want to sight read, learn music theory or just practice an instrument, surely there's a better way? Right? This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
Notation is cool and just right, the more I learned the more I appreciated how great contemporary notation is. Yes it's challenging to read sometines but the subject is challenging too, surely you could try to simplify it for certain applications but you'd lose a lot of flexibility.
Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard which is also extremely convenient thing to play compared to other stuff, even to grid controllers.
His video about reality TV music, and the one about the newest musescore default font, are some of my favourite yt videos of all time. Great communicator.
Alternately, if you want to go on the same journey Keary (the person you mention) went on to form an opinion on what constitutes good vs. bad UX design in music/notation/DAW software, they've also put out a whole series of videos taking the piss out of the UX of most of the software in the field:
So, they've realized podcasters and vloggers are a large part of their target audience. Then I believe they have to implement some models for speech restoration.
These days most people just Adobe Podcast Enhance and forget and, from what I've seen there isn't an open source GUI based tool for automated voice processing out there.
Must add that it's so awesome to have an open source Qt based audio editor on KDE Plasma that does not look like shit!
Yes, Tantacrul. Pretty weird story, a composer and programmer who absolutely roasted the UIs of well known sheet music dinosaurs Finale and Sibelius in hilarious diss videos on YouTube. Then he conceded a bit reluctantly that Musescore was the better of the lot, but still had plenty of opinions on how it could be better.
So the guitar tabs website which had then recently acquired Musescore offered him a job. Not just a job, but basically to be boss of the whole thing. Then they bought audacity, staffpad and Hal Leonard too. Then they bought out their private equity backer.
I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up. They haven't enshittified it (from my perspective as a user anyway). It seems in the end these people just loved music more than they loved money.
> I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up.
Just remember bad news sells. I'm reasonably sure there are a number of other cases where this happens, likely most. However they are not big news and not memorable so I can't cite them.
I remember using Audacity back in 2006-ish, I just needed some basic mp3 editing and I was so happy with it. Has been my go to audio editor for, goodness feels weird to say, decades now, awesome to hear them staying alive and improving. Hooray opensource / PE not killing something good!
Not trying to hate because a FOSS audio editor is great, but all of these UI improvements are carbon copies from conventional DAWs or video editors, invented 30 or so years ago. Like giving audio clips a header which lets you move them around, or letting you adjust the audio clip start/end by dragging the start/end of the clip, are not exactly revolutionary in 2026. Maybe Audacity will re-invent automation lanes next? I'm not against it. I don't see how any of this requires user studies and the framing as some kind of breakthrough though.
I've given up on Audacity because it hasn't kept up technically with how a typical home studio Linux system does audio, and looking at the change log it seems like they haven't addressed any of the problems I have with it in version 4.
You'd think, well, it supports JACK, so you're gold on both JACK and Pipewire, but they only do this in an extremely annoying way. It doesn't create a persistent JACK client. Only when you start playback or recording does it temporarily create a JACK client which disappears when playback or recording stops taking any connections you've made to it with it. The temporary JACK client then must autoconnect to a sink or source, for whatever reason that is neither a limitation of PW nor JACK.
So you'll undo this jank with an automatic connection manager, right? You'll configure it to immediately disconnect from whatever Audacity decided to connect to and automatically connect it to the source you want to record. Well, they've given the short-lived JACK client the brilliant and informative name "PortAudio", which is of course shared by other applications using portaudio. Even more brilliantly, the I/O ports are given new names on each new client!
Some while ago I started Audacity up (having forgotten that it's broken) and got invited to a user survey. There was no concern at all in the survey about the thing that Audacity fundamentally does. Do I want it to be a DAW? Do I want to be able to buy plugins within it? Do I want AI features?
Merely being asked these questions while their broken JACK implementation persists pissed me off. I want it to record and play back audio first of all. Audacity 4 looks like it's in the bizarre situation where it kind of looks like a well-designed DAW but behaves like it doesn't care about audio.
If you watch the admittedly long video from Tantacrul about what it took to get from 3.0 to 4.0 he talks about that. They had a lot of tech debt that made it impossible to update the audio engine. He talked about the new engine being the roadmap for 4.1.
I saw the Tantacrul video back when it was released. I think that's when I went ahead and bought myself a personal Reaper license. My thought then was: wtf are their priorities like if they'll focus on a complete overhaul of the admittedly basic but functional interface over broken recording and playback of audio?
Wow. I ran into a subset of a few weeks back when all I was trying to do was record from a specific microphone connected to my laptop. I thought I just didn't know what I was doing! I gave up after 20 minutes of fiddling and used something else that saw the microphone immediately.
I have been using Audacity 3 for making music with samples for a few years. And it sort of worked, but there were a lot of things that were inconvenient, like the project sometimes not saving, or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip.
I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them.
> or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip
Are you sure this isn't just the typical "clip/crop a sample at the wrong moment, in the middle of a soundwave, and you'll get a pop/click"? This problem happens all across DAWs and hardware samplers and such, usually there is a way to "align to zero-crossings" when you wanna avoid it, or called something similar. I'd be surprised if Audacity didn't have that optionally since before, or that they didn't have it before but now with Audacity 4 it would suddenly be used automatically, that'd be somewhat strange too.
At least with Reaper, if you cut an audio clip it will, by default, automatically apply small adjustable fade in/out envelopes to the ends so you specifically don't have to manually do it.
I think you're right. Audacity does have a "zero-crossings" thing, but when I tried using it a long time ago, it didn't seem to work, and I just learned to do fade-in/out for everything. Maybe I did something incorrectly.
I know it's not a proper metric to judge by, but Tenacity is 10k commits behind Audacity. That's quite a lot to get behind since the split. I'd be interested if Tenacity is actively developed or pretty much just maintaining the software from where they split.
I just started the appimage - it asks you to login to the "cloud" but also offers a prominent skip button, and then asks if you want a telemetry UUID or not.
Probably no big external dependencies or any assets. It looks like something full of handwritten code, down to the self-rendered UI-elements. Also it's written in C/C++ and assembler, so there is no unnecessary bloat shipped out-of-the-box.
Just an educated guess, but perhaps there are optional dependencies missing in the arm64 version. Some programs are still broken or perform badly on arm64.
The direction Audacity has been heading now is ok, but it's not for me. I really miss the days when it was just an editor for audio files. I have a DAW already, thanks, but I do still need to just quickly pop open a sample file to trim, normalize, maybe stretch it. I don't want to create a "project" or save really anything other than the edited audio.
On a different corner of the open source ecosystem, PrusaSlicer, also a wxWidget project, just announced the first of its v3 releases with a full GUI rewrite, and what a blast from the past it was to have a X11, non-scaled, wrong font & dpi. It's really unfortunate that they didn't take the opportunity to switch to Qt
Most people that have never maintained >=Qt5 projects assume free wxWidgets native cross platform OS interface support is less hassle.
Refactoring the application core means their team should have forked the project to audacity-qt rather than inject long term Qt library and license dependency issues into the original package.
Qt on occasion has proven to cause problems with license term changes, GL library bugs on Linux window managers no one ever fixes, and a chain of legacy build issues.
Microsoft people tend to design around entertainment eye candy rather than functional long-term reliability. A interface use-case context pop-up isn't a design choice, but rather just chaotic depending on who is using the seat.
The Audacity 3 interface certainly needed a lot of work, but nuking it for v4 re-write is simply packaging a different program as the original.
Hopefully the remake works out. The odds are not in their favor though... =3
Downloaded the AppImage, chmod +x and ran it from my user space on Debian Trixie under Gnome. I went for light, colourful and modern UI, skipped the login/cloud invite, disabled the telemetry and started it up.
Quite chatty when running it from the terminal, but seems to be working well on my Thinkpad X250 landfill laptop. Looks 'flat' and all in the modern style, but adapts to the 1366x768 letterbox that is my screen nicely.
Looks great. I remember a company sort of bought it but afaict they didn’t monetize it. I don’t remember the strategy, or why it was acquired, does anyone recall it?
It’s the same company that bought MuseScore, they basically plan on monetizing it through plugins, audio samples, or optional cloud services (like MuseScore)
They must have abandoned such plans (if they had any) when they got some backlash after they added telemetry features and half a dozen forks popped up overnight.
>> The following Audacity 3 features are not available in Audacity 4.0, but we're working on adding them in future releases.
Time Tracks
Note/MIDI tracks
Mixer
Macro Manager and the scripting pipe
VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting
Play-at-speed
Sync-Lock and the old tool modes were replaced by the workflows described above.
>>Additionally, Audacity 4 ships with some missing exporting and rendering features, analyzers, and effects.
the release date is decided before the work even starts. Whatever's done gets released, and marketing gets to claim a new major version. When it's still a work in progress. All software works like this nowadays (I'm sure it doesn't really.... but it sure looks that way). A lot of software I use have missing features in their latest major version
I remember using this software when I was 13 y.o. (I'm 31 now). I would turn songs I liked backwards to try to find satanic messages. Good memories haha.
Ooooh my you made me feel old (I'm 45). We used to manually turn LPs backwards to do the same. Or sometimes press the PLAY and << buttons at the same time in tape players to try to achieve the same.
After I change from "Program Files" to a user's folder it brings up the UAC.
Why? The "files association still needs it" is not an answer. It is plain unnecessary risk, does not matter that the original author is trusted, still can be hacked.
For some reason, almost all audio apps have very odd scroll and zooming behaviour (and home/end keys also do weird things). Also doing basic things like starting playback or recording from start or from cursor tends to be quite complex in many of them. It would be interesting to know why that is so. Maybe it is so that you don't accidentally trigger it? If you're just doing editing and never recording, you never want to trigger recording with r, only with some complex modifier combo. But if you're a musician, that's about all you do, hit record and stop and playback and stop.
So it's not native anymore. One of the coolest things Audacity had, at least for me, was the fact it was built using wxWidgets.
I also wonder how is the Muse group perceived nowadays? I remember them acquiring Audacity was a huge mess when it happened due to them introducing telemetry. Never used Audacity since then.
I have used old audacity and musescore-owned audacity, and I have to say it's a massive glow-up.
I use REAPER for most things, but audacity has found a nice little niche when it comes to recording voice clips because it just does it with less hassle.
I'd love to understand better how they can afford a 10+ person team working on this and then give it all away for free. After paying the original Audacity creators a fair chunk of money to buy it, even. Is that audio.com sign in screen really bringing in that much money?
I mean I love it, to be fair when it got acquired I didn't have high hopes given how these things usually go, but Muse has so far been a spectacular steward and this huge redesign+refactor effort is a clear testament to that.
The video on their audio editor would have been much more interesting and widely useful if they instead showed how they made their beautiful video. There is much more combined video and audio editing going on than audio-editing alone and doing this well is difficult and time-consuming.
2 reminders that I find always need to be mentioned in audacity threads:
1) Audacity is not a DAW. I love it, it’s an incredibly robust tool. But I would not use it like a fully fledged DAW.
2) Reaper isn’t free. They have an incredibly generous “try before you buy” license, and you should reward them by paying $40 if you use it and decide it is a tool you want to continue to use!
For those who haven't made the connection, Cockos, the company who make REAPER, is run by Justin Frankel, previously the founder of Nullsoft, the company who made Winamp. REAPER very much carries the Winamp torch of robust, resource-efficient software, and in the 15 or so years I've used it as a hobbyist, I don't think I've ever lost any work due to the software's fault.
There video on their audio editor would have been much more interesting and widely useful if they instead showed how they made their beautiful video. There is much more combined video and audio editing going on than audio-editing alone and doing this well is difficult and time-consuming.
If anyone here has contributed to Audacity I just want to say thank you. I'm not a power user. I'm not in audio. However, over the years I have installed Audacity to do some audio things here and there. It has always been so useful.
Surprised to see this upvoted to no. 1 on Hacker News in 2026. I used Audacity as recently as yesterday so I joined in and upvoted too. True that it has now displaced many commercial applications in the same niche.
Wasn't audacity taken over by a company sniffing for user data, some years ago?
I noted this down into a local .yml file back in 2021, when Muse Group took over and wanted to telemetry-sniff people. I didn't pay attention to audacity past that point.
Also, many accounts on hackernews act very suspiciously, with just raw promo as it if comes from an advertising account. I am noticing this increasingly, where people comment regular news with "this is great!!!!!". That makes no sense.
Yes, but they apparently hired a competent team and listened to user feedback. I don’t think this is astroturfing. Around a year ago they announced their plans for Audacity 4 in an hour-long video and it went somewhat viral, so this is a highly anticipated release.
Anyone who's dealt with ultimate guitar will tell you they're bottom feeding scumbags. At least, 100% of the people I know who've dealt with UG feel that way.
I wouldn't be shocked at all if suspicious comments were bogus. Hell, I'd be shocked if UG wasn't doing something untoward.
They also fucked musescore as well. Evil pigfuckers.
I can now admit I have always hated using Audacity before, and these updates, just looking at the release videos, have finally won me over. Incredible makeover of a free software application. Good job all!
Very disappointed to see a program I remembered fondly for its native-feeling interface and functional, wholegrain feeling turned into whatever this is. It’s akin to a nutrient-rich home cooked meal being replaced with McDonald’s. I should’ve known it was doomed from the moment
I saw an advertisement for their Discord chat room in the readme.
This doesn't feel like very constructive feedback. Have you actually tried 4.0 yet, or were you too put off by the Discord link to proceed?
IMO Audacity has never been particularly native-feeling, and I don't buy the McDonalds analogy - this release is still lightweight. It'd be a fair comment if they'd e.g. move to Electron, but Qt 6 is hardly that.
Yeah, it's sad to see how such a great program was ruined by yet another company. Opened it the other day and was greeted with a welcome screen that advertised some online service, then I had to turn off telemetry and there is some cloud integration now?
Many will discover >=Qt5 GL sometimes breaks in non-repairable ways on some linux desktops.
On windows 11, Qt is usually fine if the license is still compatible... The old wxWidgets supports native OS interface targeting being truly cross-platform.
Like all eye-candy interfaces at Microsoft, it will work until it doesn't. =3
open source apps can be insanely powerful (and free!) but a thing that keeps a lot of them from 'mainstream' adoption is simply the F-tier user experience
gimp had the same issue and i wouldnt be surprised if you also miss the old GTK UI?
making audacity feel like a modern app instead of a dusty relic isnt making it into McDonalds..
I for one applaud this upgrade -- its the polish it should have had years ago
I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
Indirectly related his video on music notation itself, "Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music"[1], is really good IMHO.
> Many people feel that western notation makes it unnecessarily hard to read music. If we want to sight read, learn music theory or just practice an instrument, surely there's a better way? Right? This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4
Notation is cool and just right, the more I learned the more I appreciated how great contemporary notation is. Yes it's challenging to read sometines but the subject is challenging too, surely you could try to simplify it for certain applications but you'd lose a lot of flexibility.
Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard which is also extremely convenient thing to play compared to other stuff, even to grid controllers.
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His video about reality TV music, and the one about the newest musescore default font, are some of my favourite yt videos of all time. Great communicator.
Alternately, if you want to go on the same journey Keary (the person you mention) went on to form an opinion on what constitutes good vs. bad UX design in music/notation/DAW software, they've also put out a whole series of videos taking the piss out of the UX of most of the software in the field:
- Reason (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PFRyONURSo)
- Sibelius (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI)
- MuseScore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A)
- Dorico (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8)
This video is simply excellent. Really shows the challenges involved.
His other videos are awesome too. He is an expert in making great software AND a great video creator.
He also hit the nail on the head- reaction videos are just low effort click bait.
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So, they've realized podcasters and vloggers are a large part of their target audience. Then I believe they have to implement some models for speech restoration.
These days most people just Adobe Podcast Enhance and forget and, from what I've seen there isn't an open source GUI based tool for automated voice processing out there.
Must add that it's so awesome to have an open source Qt based audio editor on KDE Plasma that does not look like shit!
Yes, Tantacrul. Pretty weird story, a composer and programmer who absolutely roasted the UIs of well known sheet music dinosaurs Finale and Sibelius in hilarious diss videos on YouTube. Then he conceded a bit reluctantly that Musescore was the better of the lot, but still had plenty of opinions on how it could be better.
So the guitar tabs website which had then recently acquired Musescore offered him a job. Not just a job, but basically to be boss of the whole thing. Then they bought audacity, staffpad and Hal Leonard too. Then they bought out their private equity backer.
I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up. They haven't enshittified it (from my perspective as a user anyway). It seems in the end these people just loved music more than they loved money.
He, unfortunately, left recently. https://x.com/Tantacrul/status/2092817784782598440
> I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up.
Just remember bad news sells. I'm reasonably sure there are a number of other cases where this happens, likely most. However they are not big news and not memorable so I can't cite them.
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AFAIK, Francisco Partners was only involved in the Hal Leonard acquisition.
It was more of a partnership regarding Hal Leonard than ownership of Muse.
It seems after the Native Instruments fiasco, they (Francisco Partners) just decided to quit music altogether.
EDIT: I know a lot of people from Muse and Native Instruments and that's the impression a lot seem to have.
MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar unfortunately both have some dark patterns around subscriptions and data collection. But yeah very weird situation
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>conceded a bit reluctantly that Musescore was the better of the lot
Well he said that Sibelius was the best for serious musicians, it just had a horrible UI.
I remember using Audacity back in 2006-ish, I just needed some basic mp3 editing and I was so happy with it. Has been my go to audio editor for, goodness feels weird to say, decades now, awesome to hear them staying alive and improving. Hooray opensource / PE not killing something good!
Not trying to hate because a FOSS audio editor is great, but all of these UI improvements are carbon copies from conventional DAWs or video editors, invented 30 or so years ago. Like giving audio clips a header which lets you move them around, or letting you adjust the audio clip start/end by dragging the start/end of the clip, are not exactly revolutionary in 2026. Maybe Audacity will re-invent automation lanes next? I'm not against it. I don't see how any of this requires user studies and the framing as some kind of breakthrough though.
Beat me to it, I was just about to post this. It's a really cool breakdown of what goes into supporting and modernising such old open source software.
Damn this guy is well versed on the topic at hand. Really clear and nice video.
I don't even need to watch that video to be reminded of the tagline - "Audacity says no!". Agreed this is a great watch for pretty much any developer.
Quit Sibelius
all of his videos are amazing
Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM
It should be illegal to announce a UI update and not include at least screenshots, so thanks for sharing.
The URL should probably be its landing page, which does a good job with the overview: https://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-4/
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Wow, looks amazing. Qt6 seems to be really great.
Is there a free open source tool for video editing that has the same UX chops?
In case you missed it, yesterday there was a hn post about openshot 4 (also a Qt modernization release)
It seems like the new UI look doesn't have light mode available and the only option to have it is to switch back to the old UI? That's a weird choice.
They do appear to have a light mode, along with general UI customizability according to the homepage [1].
1: https://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-4/
I usually hate product announce videos but this one is so concise and fast and to the point, I'm very impressed. Also wow the new UI looks delicious!
Best thing is it's not just a new coat of paint; there seem to be some very significant usability improvements in here.
Delicious really is a great word! It looks gorgeous and so pleasant to use.
Yeah, it is a hand-made video! Someone put actual work into it. :-) Results are speaking.
Lost me at QT.
Why do you care so much about the UI framework used?
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I've given up on Audacity because it hasn't kept up technically with how a typical home studio Linux system does audio, and looking at the change log it seems like they haven't addressed any of the problems I have with it in version 4.
You'd think, well, it supports JACK, so you're gold on both JACK and Pipewire, but they only do this in an extremely annoying way. It doesn't create a persistent JACK client. Only when you start playback or recording does it temporarily create a JACK client which disappears when playback or recording stops taking any connections you've made to it with it. The temporary JACK client then must autoconnect to a sink or source, for whatever reason that is neither a limitation of PW nor JACK.
So you'll undo this jank with an automatic connection manager, right? You'll configure it to immediately disconnect from whatever Audacity decided to connect to and automatically connect it to the source you want to record. Well, they've given the short-lived JACK client the brilliant and informative name "PortAudio", which is of course shared by other applications using portaudio. Even more brilliantly, the I/O ports are given new names on each new client!
Some while ago I started Audacity up (having forgotten that it's broken) and got invited to a user survey. There was no concern at all in the survey about the thing that Audacity fundamentally does. Do I want it to be a DAW? Do I want to be able to buy plugins within it? Do I want AI features?
Merely being asked these questions while their broken JACK implementation persists pissed me off. I want it to record and play back audio first of all. Audacity 4 looks like it's in the bizarre situation where it kind of looks like a well-designed DAW but behaves like it doesn't care about audio.
If you watch the admittedly long video from Tantacrul about what it took to get from 3.0 to 4.0 he talks about that. They had a lot of tech debt that made it impossible to update the audio engine. He talked about the new engine being the roadmap for 4.1.
I saw the Tantacrul video back when it was released. I think that's when I went ahead and bought myself a personal Reaper license. My thought then was: wtf are their priorities like if they'll focus on a complete overhaul of the admittedly basic but functional interface over broken recording and playback of audio?
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Wow. I ran into a subset of a few weeks back when all I was trying to do was record from a specific microphone connected to my laptop. I thought I just didn't know what I was doing! I gave up after 20 minutes of fiddling and used something else that saw the microphone immediately.
I have been using Audacity 3 for making music with samples for a few years. And it sort of worked, but there were a lot of things that were inconvenient, like the project sometimes not saving, or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip.
I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them.
> or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip
Are you sure this isn't just the typical "clip/crop a sample at the wrong moment, in the middle of a soundwave, and you'll get a pop/click"? This problem happens all across DAWs and hardware samplers and such, usually there is a way to "align to zero-crossings" when you wanna avoid it, or called something similar. I'd be surprised if Audacity didn't have that optionally since before, or that they didn't have it before but now with Audacity 4 it would suddenly be used automatically, that'd be somewhat strange too.
At least with Reaper, if you cut an audio clip it will, by default, automatically apply small adjustable fade in/out envelopes to the ends so you specifically don't have to manually do it.
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I think you're right. Audacity does have a "zero-crossings" thing, but when I tried using it a long time ago, it didn't seem to work, and I just learned to do fade-in/out for everything. Maybe I did something incorrectly.
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Yep that was my thought as well. Most DAWs default to a very quick cross fade when joining two clips for this very reason.
Whatever happened with the post-telemetry fork debacle projects? Tenacity, Sneedacity, or something...
Someone mentions it here: https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity/activity/yearly
Looks healthy?
I know it's not a proper metric to judge by, but Tenacity is 10k commits behind Audacity. That's quite a lot to get behind since the split. I'd be interested if Tenacity is actively developed or pretty much just maintaining the software from where they split.
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The Mac build isn't really usable. You have to manually remove the quarantine flag.
How's the telemetry situation nowadays? I haven't been updating my copy for a while.
I just started the appimage - it asks you to login to the "cloud" but also offers a prominent skip button, and then asks if you want a telemetry UUID or not.
So even after the intense backlash Tantacrul saw on the GH threads, they went ahead and stuffed it full of telemetry anyway. Incredible.
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I don't know, but I once ran strace on version 3 and was horrified by the number of files it touched at startup. Then tried accessing the internet.
in the age of 500MB apps (thanks to electron); it is refreshing to see a sub-50MB app again.
Reaper install is 13 megs. I have no idea how is this possible today.
Probably no big external dependencies or any assets. It looks like something full of handwritten code, down to the self-rendered UI-elements. Also it's written in C/C++ and assembler, so there is no unnecessary bloat shipped out-of-the-box.
Because they're good
And it's good. It also seems to have the most flexible plugin system of any DAW that has decent level of usage.
can just swap electron for tauri for example
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Now that I look at it, why is the arm64 that much smaller then x86_64?
36 vs 47MB
Just an educated guess, but perhaps there are optional dependencies missing in the arm64 version. Some programs are still broken or perform badly on arm64.
I think it has to do with arm64 not supporting plugins and thus not shipping with any.
On MacOS is went from 189mb->128mb for v3->v4 which is nice
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Is the team funded off audacity merch sales? What's the most effective way for me to support the continuity of their work?
The direction Audacity has been heading now is ok, but it's not for me. I really miss the days when it was just an editor for audio files. I have a DAW already, thanks, but I do still need to just quickly pop open a sample file to trim, normalize, maybe stretch it. I don't want to create a "project" or save really anything other than the edited audio.
I feel you and that’s why I use tenacity, the spiritual continuation of the original audacity.
As always, abandoning GTK (or libadwaita. ew.) for Qt is a welcome change. Good for them.
It was using wxWidgets, not GTK directly IIRC
Ah, the dream of "one UI toolkit to rule them all" was very much alive when wxWidgets got popular around the turn of the millennium
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On a different corner of the open source ecosystem, PrusaSlicer, also a wxWidget project, just announced the first of its v3 releases with a full GUI rewrite, and what a blast from the past it was to have a X11, non-scaled, wrong font & dpi. It's really unfortunate that they didn't take the opportunity to switch to Qt
Most people that have never maintained >=Qt5 projects assume free wxWidgets native cross platform OS interface support is less hassle.
Refactoring the application core means their team should have forked the project to audacity-qt rather than inject long term Qt library and license dependency issues into the original package.
Qt on occasion has proven to cause problems with license term changes, GL library bugs on Linux window managers no one ever fixes, and a chain of legacy build issues.
Microsoft people tend to design around entertainment eye candy rather than functional long-term reliability. A interface use-case context pop-up isn't a design choice, but rather just chaotic depending on who is using the seat.
The Audacity 3 interface certainly needed a lot of work, but nuking it for v4 re-write is simply packaging a different program as the original.
Hopefully the remake works out. The odds are not in their favor though... =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
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Downloaded the AppImage, chmod +x and ran it from my user space on Debian Trixie under Gnome. I went for light, colourful and modern UI, skipped the login/cloud invite, disabled the telemetry and started it up.
Quite chatty when running it from the terminal, but seems to be working well on my Thinkpad X250 landfill laptop. Looks 'flat' and all in the modern style, but adapts to the 1366x768 letterbox that is my screen nicely.
Looks great. I remember a company sort of bought it but afaict they didn’t monetize it. I don’t remember the strategy, or why it was acquired, does anyone recall it?
It’s the same company that bought MuseScore, they basically plan on monetizing it through plugins, audio samples, or optional cloud services (like MuseScore)
They must have abandoned such plans (if they had any) when they got some backlash after they added telemetry features and half a dozen forks popped up overnight.
They haven't
Just go the main homepage and there is a banner which leads you to buy the latest plugin
https://www.audacityteam.org/
But hontestly nothing wrong with that imo
> half a dozen forks popped up overnight
There is only one actively maintained fork https://tenacityaudio.org/
>> The following Audacity 3 features are not available in Audacity 4.0, but we're working on adding them in future releases.
Time Tracks Note/MIDI tracks Mixer Macro Manager and the scripting pipe VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting Play-at-speed Sync-Lock and the old tool modes were replaced by the workflows described above.
>>Additionally, Audacity 4 ships with some missing exporting and rendering features, analyzers, and effects.
LADSPA sounds pretty critical; did they really ship with that missing?
LADSPA v1 is ancient and fundamentally quite broken, and that's what they dropped. Audacity 4 ships with LV2 (i.e. LADSPA v2) support.
FWIW I don't think I've used a v1 LADSPA plugin for a decade.
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the release date is decided before the work even starts. Whatever's done gets released, and marketing gets to claim a new major version. When it's still a work in progress. All software works like this nowadays (I'm sure it doesn't really.... but it sure looks that way). A lot of software I use have missing features in their latest major version
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Love what Audacity has become, especially the new UI that does not look like it was forced through some scrum pipeline
Eh? It looks exactly like it was put through a scrum pipeline.
What does that mean?
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While I agree tbf it could be much worse
I dunno if you're aware of the back story behind these UI design improvements but that's about as far from the truth as it's possible to get.
I remember using this software when I was 13 y.o. (I'm 31 now). I would turn songs I liked backwards to try to find satanic messages. Good memories haha.
I've only found one genuine satanic message.
A weird al song from either polka party or in 3d has a section along the lines of "Satan loves cheese wiz" when played backward.
Ooooh my you made me feel old (I'm 45). We used to manually turn LPs backwards to do the same. Or sometimes press the PLAY and << buttons at the same time in tape players to try to achieve the same.
After I change from "Program Files" to a user's folder it brings up the UAC.
Why? The "files association still needs it" is not an answer. It is plain unnecessary risk, does not matter that the original author is trusted, still can be hacked.
Simple solution here, use a high quality OS.
For some reason, almost all audio apps have very odd scroll and zooming behaviour (and home/end keys also do weird things). Also doing basic things like starting playback or recording from start or from cursor tends to be quite complex in many of them. It would be interesting to know why that is so. Maybe it is so that you don't accidentally trigger it? If you're just doing editing and never recording, you never want to trigger recording with r, only with some complex modifier combo. But if you're a musician, that's about all you do, hit record and stop and playback and stop.
Love to see a winamp-era software evolving to this beauty. Enveloppes and UI colors looks like ableton in a good way.
So it's not native anymore. One of the coolest things Audacity had, at least for me, was the fact it was built using wxWidgets.
I also wonder how is the Muse group perceived nowadays? I remember them acquiring Audacity was a huge mess when it happened due to them introducing telemetry. Never used Audacity since then.
Hahah - I woke up this morning going "I want to use something like Audacity, but doesn't create such enormous project files".
Hoping they've fixed that, looking forward to it! UI looks great too!
Reporting back - project files are still huge. I suppose that is just a side effect of it bundling the audio directly into the project file.
Just makes the files very hard to share with others online though..
I have used old audacity and musescore-owned audacity, and I have to say it's a massive glow-up.
I use REAPER for most things, but audacity has found a nice little niche when it comes to recording voice clips because it just does it with less hassle.
It's in good hands.
I'd love to understand better how they can afford a 10+ person team working on this and then give it all away for free. After paying the original Audacity creators a fair chunk of money to buy it, even. Is that audio.com sign in screen really bringing in that much money?
I mean I love it, to be fair when it got acquired I didn't have high hopes given how these things usually go, but Muse has so far been a spectacular steward and this huge redesign+refactor effort is a clear testament to that.
Whoa what a glow up!
I hope aup4 is smaller than aup3, because my number one headache with Audacity is file size bloat. Otherwise I love it!
The video on their audio editor would have been much more interesting and widely useful if they instead showed how they made their beautiful video. There is much more combined video and audio editing going on than audio-editing alone and doing this well is difficult and time-consuming.
Audacity and Avidemux have allowed me to look much more skilled in media editing than I have any right to claim
What I really hope for is searchable filters. With filter packs installed I simply cannot find them in slow scrolling menu list.
I've always loved audacity, but have always found its editing workflow to be hard to use. This seems an improvement.
P.S.: I don't care for looks, but UX seems better. I will try it.
Anyone else watch the video and catch Dunder Mifflin @ 4:11?
Using this for my webcam background moving forward!
2 reminders that I find always need to be mentioned in audacity threads:
1) Audacity is not a DAW. I love it, it’s an incredibly robust tool. But I would not use it like a fully fledged DAW.
2) Reaper isn’t free. They have an incredibly generous “try before you buy” license, and you should reward them by paying $40 if you use it and decide it is a tool you want to continue to use!
For those who haven't made the connection, Cockos, the company who make REAPER, is run by Justin Frankel, previously the founder of Nullsoft, the company who made Winamp. REAPER very much carries the Winamp torch of robust, resource-efficient software, and in the 15 or so years I've used it as a hobbyist, I don't think I've ever lost any work due to the software's fault.
I didn't even know I wanted this! Always nice to see a great product made even better.
Looks like most of the timeline editing feature could be successfully ported to Kdenlive (FOSS for video-editing)
Wow, the UX has come a long way, can't wait to try it.
What is MuseHub and how is Audacity related to it?
So many 2002 Cool Edit Pro 2.0 vibes!
Yes, this is what I learned on! It was great to see it survive, but a disappointment to see how locked behind a wall it was.
I hope app startup times have been improved, at some this regressed massively, from 0.5s to like 2s.
What do you recommend for destructive editing which is open-source ?
Audacity :) (as an app) and Audiomass on web (I am biased towards it of course)
Thank you so much for AudioMass, my go to for basic audio editing when I don't need a DAW. Instant web app that processes locally, great to see.
There video on their audio editor would have been much more interesting and widely useful if they instead showed how they made their beautiful video. There is much more combined video and audio editing going on than audio-editing alone and doing this well is difficult and time-consuming.
If anyone here has contributed to Audacity I just want to say thank you. I'm not a power user. I'm not in audio. However, over the years I have installed Audacity to do some audio things here and there. It has always been so useful.
The new editing features will be pretty useful for sound design.
I am sure that Suno would love to buy Audacity.
Why do you think that is?
Good synergy. I use both; I can see them integrated.
I imagine the backlash would kill it.
It's GPL; it would be forked immediately and business as usual.
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Surprised to see this upvoted to no. 1 on Hacker News in 2026. I used Audacity as recently as yesterday so I joined in and upvoted too. True that it has now displaced many commercial applications in the same niche.
Hopefully there will be a selfhostable implementation of their cloud counterpart someday? Maybe only a weekend of vibecoding away.
What features do you need? Cloud saving?
I don't understand what you're talking about.
If you want a local cloud, save things to your computer or NAS. You do know how to do that, right?
No need to mindlessly slop code something.
But how will I get my dopamine hits without vibe coding?
just use a modern 'rclone gui' web interface to setup your cloud or sshfs shares. =3
Wasn't audacity taken over by a company sniffing for user data, some years ago?
I noted this down into a local .yml file back in 2021, when Muse Group took over and wanted to telemetry-sniff people. I didn't pay attention to audacity past that point.
Also, many accounts on hackernews act very suspiciously, with just raw promo as it if comes from an advertising account. I am noticing this increasingly, where people comment regular news with "this is great!!!!!". That makes no sense.
Yes, but they apparently hired a competent team and listened to user feedback. I don’t think this is astroturfing. Around a year ago they announced their plans for Audacity 4 in an hour-long video and it went somewhat viral, so this is a highly anticipated release.
AFAIK it was just regular usage telemetry. Audacity asks you on start if you want take part now.
Anyone who's dealt with ultimate guitar will tell you they're bottom feeding scumbags. At least, 100% of the people I know who've dealt with UG feel that way.
I wouldn't be shocked at all if suspicious comments were bogus. Hell, I'd be shocked if UG wasn't doing something untoward.
They also fucked musescore as well. Evil pigfuckers.
I used Audacity decades ago (2006-2010) but when I stopped buying PCs I always found there was noise on a Mac so I switched to logic.
I always thought audacity was great, and still prefer its workflow to slow tools or logic. I haven’t ever tried Reaper however.
Most pro audio recorders come with a free desktop Steinberg Cubase license card.
On MacOS it is probably one of the better options for lossless workflows. =3
What possesses people to not include a screenshot on pages like this?
I can now admit I have always hated using Audacity before, and these updates, just looking at the release videos, have finally won me over. Incredible makeover of a free software application. Good job all!
Finally looks great!
It's been many years since I used Audacity but the interface looks vastly improved.
But where is the AI pfft
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> some controls have moved or changed
The audacity! /s
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Very disappointed to see a program I remembered fondly for its native-feeling interface and functional, wholegrain feeling turned into whatever this is. It’s akin to a nutrient-rich home cooked meal being replaced with McDonald’s. I should’ve known it was doomed from the moment I saw an advertisement for their Discord chat room in the readme.
This doesn't feel like very constructive feedback. Have you actually tried 4.0 yet, or were you too put off by the Discord link to proceed?
IMO Audacity has never been particularly native-feeling, and I don't buy the McDonalds analogy - this release is still lightweight. It'd be a fair comment if they'd e.g. move to Electron, but Qt 6 is hardly that.
wxWidgets uses the native OS interfaces. They have a valid point about Qt sometimes breaking things, and should be packaged as an audacity-qt6 fork.
Your perspective is also valid, in that it could be phrased a little kinder. =3
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Yeah, it's sad to see how such a great program was ruined by yet another company. Opened it the other day and was greeted with a welcome screen that advertised some online service, then I had to turn off telemetry and there is some cloud integration now?
What about the new design do you think is not functional any more compared to version 3?
Many will discover >=Qt5 GL sometimes breaks in non-repairable ways on some linux desktops.
On windows 11, Qt is usually fine if the license is still compatible... The old wxWidgets supports native OS interface targeting being truly cross-platform.
Like all eye-candy interfaces at Microsoft, it will work until it doesn't. =3
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Audacity users are not programmers.
Discord is the right platform to get feedback from normies.
open source apps can be insanely powerful (and free!) but a thing that keeps a lot of them from 'mainstream' adoption is simply the F-tier user experience
gimp had the same issue and i wouldnt be surprised if you also miss the old GTK UI?
making audacity feel like a modern app instead of a dusty relic isnt making it into McDonalds..
I for one applaud this upgrade -- its the polish it should have had years ago
I’ve long despised GTK and GIMP in general so I don’t think I’d like any form of its UI.
Ah yes, the native looking interface that doesn't even properly scale on a 4k monitor! Good times!
God forbid someone actually improves a software!
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> Very disappointed to see a program I remembered fondly for its native-feeling interface and functional
But it used wxWidgets, so by definition, NOT native interface