I’m a little out of the loop, but I recall Audacity took a massive nose dive a while ago. Have they recovered from this?
In particular, the cloud features doesn’t pass the smell test for me. Is this one of those apps where you download the old version?
It’s still going but I think a good chunk of the FOSS community avoids it. Distros that still ships it disable the telemetry.
Definitely feels like the desperate attempts to monetize it, and the enshittification that typically arises next.
As far as I know it’s still fine to use if your distro disables the telemetry, which is what most people had issues with. It’s still under the same license in the end, which is probably why they’re now pivoting to cloud features: that they can make proprietary. I’m sure cloud-based AI plugins are next.
On the one hand they should be paid for there work. On the other hand that’s not the right way to get paid for work.
They should ask for donations and sell cool merch
that’s not that right way to get paid
I don’t know a whole lot about what Audacity is up to these days, but the same company owns MuseScore, and it sounds like they’re doing kinda similar things in terms of monetisation. The core software itself is still free, but there are optional cloud services on top of that which you can pay for.
I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Cloud services provide a convenience. Some people like that convenience and are willing to pay for it. Others might be perfectly ok doing it themselves and won’t pay.
It helps that the new head of design for both of these products is a guy who really knows his shit. He’s already taken MuseScore from an application that nobody in their right mind would use if they could afford the commercial competitors, to a legitimately great music engraving application, and he’s been on Audacity too since 2021.
The problem lies in the fact that these services are completely proprietary and are an example of service as a software substitute.
Foss should encourage privacy and freedom. Cloud storage doesn’t normally do that. What’s worse it it often requires non free libraries to be included which is a no no
Foss should encourage privacy and freedom. Cloud storage doesn’t normally do that.
Then don’t use it? It’s that simple. If it makes money for them and some users like it, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But it is baked in
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It helps that the new head of design for both of these products is a guy who really knows his shit. He’s already taken MuseScore from an application that nobody in their right mind would use if they could afford the commercial competitors, to a legitimately great music engraving application, and he’s been on Audacity too since 2021.
I tried Audacity before that and couldn’t migrate from adobe’s aquired CoolEditPro (Au versions before modern redesign). Have it changed much since then? I’m yet to find an alternative (video editing tools just doesn’t make it, although they get recommended) and as I can recall Audacity had an interface that’s not as easy to use.
I couldn’t tell you for sure, because I don’t use it or its commercial competition very much. That said, personally when I have needed to use it, I’ve always found the gap between Audacity and its pro equivalents in terms of basic usability to be much lower than in other creative fields. GIMP, in particular, is nigh unusable compared to Photoshop.
If you’re interested in seeing more, here’s a video where the new lead announced that he was taking it over. And the official Audacity YouTube channel has been posting overviews of its updates since then. I think it likely that the first two updates (3.1 and 3.2) contain some of the most critical functionality.
Audacity doesn’t come anywhere close to professional DAWs like Audition and it’s not really trying to be one afaik. Ardour is the way to go for professional needs.
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So what free alternative would you suggest?
The fork Tenacity
Aww I was just about gush about how awesome they’ve been all these years. Guess I haven’t really kept up to date. I mean it doesn’t sound like it’s gone totally to shit, but just clearly embarking on a path straight in to the shit
I had no idea about these updates. Which distros are clean?
Arch is, not sure about the others. I would imagine Debian also is.
Versions 3.0+ of Audacity are affected. It’s not like it’s malware and unclean but they did add telemetry and crash reporting and stuff.
Gentoo specifically switches off the telemetry (
-Daudacity_has_sentry_reporting=off,-Daudacity_has_crashreports=off). The cloud saving facility is also off by default, but can be added to the build by enabling theaudiocomUSE flag.
It’s still spyware, but people do not care anymore.
Tenacity is a thing.
Yes, exactly. Even worse that people do not care about Audacity being spyware since a good fork exists.
Thanks for the tip! Will definitely consider this when I need to edit some audio.
But Tenacity had its last release 5 months ago. Audacity too? I had the feeling they diverge a lot
I might be wrong, but I remember reading that they removed the objectionable content after the fuss that was kicked up.
They attempted to add opt-in telemetry a few years ago and people lost their shit for some reason. They didn’t merge it, but the FOSS community’s “fork first ask questions later” attitude kicked in anyway and multiple forks popped up while now the original project has permanently been labelled as spyware, which is fun. Fun fact, KDE Plasma actually has opt-in telemetry. Dolphin, Kate and a few kdepim apps also do. Plasma also has opt-in automated crash reporting, which is particularly evil. Y’all better uninstall them right now. I mean, what if you accidentally opted in, or something? Anyway, not a fan of hostile forks unless someone can actually prove the original project has gone to shit.
Why does it need cloud saving?
So other people have your data.
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Friendship with audacity ended a while ago, nobody needs cloud saving for this at ALL. Go download tenacity instead.
Shout-out to Tenacity, forked when Audacity got bought out and started heading down a dark path.
I’d be happy if I could just “hide” a section of audio without needing to delete it. I’m often trying to shorten musical pieces and having a way to hide/unhide a section would be so much easier than relying on delete/undo.
This should be possible since version 3.1: https://support.audacityteam.org/additional-resources/changelog/older-versions/audacity-3.1
The “smart clips?” Not quite… They’re only at the end of a clip to shorten it. I need to make multiple cuts in the middle.
Ah, I think that isn’t possible. You would have to split the track and then use the smart clips feature. Or you use a different tool like someone else mentioned.
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So - lets say I’m taking a long piece of music and making something like a “radio edit”.
I decide a chorus can go, maybe the another section, perhaps a repeated phrase here or there. But now it’s too short so I want to put that chorus back in. Or change how much of the chorus was removed since I removed too much.
There isn’t an easy way to undo that delete without ctrl+z’ing my way back through all my deletes. I want something like a “hide column” feature from spreadsheets where I can just skip over that section but not really delete it. And to have a marker so I can undo it and change it later.
Might be a niche request but it’s something I need to do from time-to-time.
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Excellent, I’ll check that out. Thanks!
Unrelated question, but what’s the DE in the screenshot? Looks super clean
Gnome with the dock-to-panel extension.
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It looks like Gnome.
Just speculation, but Deepin?
Does Audacity still only work with ALSA? Wish they’d use at least pulse if not pipewire…
I’ve been using Audacity with PulseAudio for quite a while now and it works fine for me. I sometimes find myself tweaking volumes in PulseAudio on the side.
Can it also record from Pulse?
Late reply, but yes. You can mix and match to record from Pulse but playback to ALSA too (or the other way around) but I think using Pulse for both makes more sense.
Didn’t Audacity already have pitch shifting? Or did they improve the algorithm? If the latter is true, this is very exciting to me
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One of the weirdest things I’ve noticed with Audacity is the file size of the projects. I have a project with 7 3-minute tracks and maybe 100 edits, and the file size is 6GB! Are the file sizes so large so that they can more easily upsell cloud storage?
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