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Discussion Sentiment

75% Positive

Analyzed from 2059 words in the discussion.

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#audacity#looks#video#software#great#https#telemetry#always#lot#don

Discussion (85 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Lautziabout 2 hours 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

mikae118 minutes ago
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!

stevoskiabout 2 hours ago
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.

vintermannabout 1 hour ago
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.

bluGillabout 1 hour ago
> 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.

awesanabout 1 hour ago
If it happens all the time and it's positive, you shouldn't need a news story to confirm it. People should just be able to think of examples.

Certainly I'm able to think of plenty of terrible results from private equity take-overs from my own personal experience as an employee or as a customer.

whstl33 minutes ago
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.

Jtarii18 minutes ago
>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.

Subdivide845214 minutes ago
Damn this guy is well versed on the topic at hand. Really clear and nice video.
chrysopraceabout 2 hours ago
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.
dbcooperabout 2 hours ago
Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM

skrebbelabout 2 hours ago
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!
Aldipowerabout 1 hour ago
Yeah, it is a hand-made video! Someone put actual work into it. :-) Results are speaking.
lovedaddyabout 1 hour ago
Lost me at QT.
dieortin44 minutes ago
Why do you care so much about the UI framework used?
LtWorf23 minutes ago
He sells RAM so he only likes extremely bloated and slow electron apps.
pelagicAustralabout 1 hour ago
Whatever happened with the post-telemetry fork debacle projects? Tenacity, Sneedacity, or something...
Mashimo38 minutes ago
Someone mentions it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49549040

https://tenacityaudio.org

Seem like they have a few commit every week. 32 Issues closed in a year: https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity/activity/yearly

Looks healthy?

elevation4 minutes ago
Is the team funded off audacity merch sales? What's the most effective way for me to support the continuity of their work?
ancientstraitsabout 2 hours ago
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.

embedding-shapeabout 1 hour ago
> 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.

ancientstraits32 minutes ago
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.
dwringer32 minutes ago
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.
folkrav30 minutes ago
Yep that was my thought as well. Most DAWs default to a very quick cross fade when joining two clips for this very reason.
Sophiraabout 1 hour ago
How's the telemetry situation nowadays? I haven't been updating my copy for a while.
_defabout 1 hour ago
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.
junonabout 1 hour ago
So even after the intense backlash Tantacrul saw on the GH threads, they went ahead and stuffed it full of telemetry anyway. Incredible.
sunaookami37 minutes ago
He is pro age-verification with government IDs, what do you expect?
AbuAssarabout 2 hours ago
in the age of 500MB apps (thanks to electron); it is refreshing to see a sub-50MB app again.
mystifyingpoiabout 1 hour ago
Reaper install is 13 megs. I have no idea how is this possible today.
Mashimoabout 1 hour ago
Now that I look at it, why is the arm64 that much smaller then x86_64?

36 vs 47MB

tostiabout 1 hour ago
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.
oidarabout 1 hour ago
>> 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.

kragenabout 1 hour ago
LADSPA sounds pretty critical; did they really ship with that missing?
vrighter23 minutes ago
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
saltysalt15 minutes ago
I hope aup4 is smaller than aup3, because my number one headache with Audacity is file size bloat. Otherwise I love it!
a1oabout 2 hours ago
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?
odo1242about 2 hours ago
It’s the same company that bought MuseScore, they basically plan on monetizing it through plugins, audio samples, or optional cloud services (like MuseScore)
tomkarhoabout 2 hours ago
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.
haunterabout 2 hours ago
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/

wconrmabout 1 hour ago
Love to see a winamp-era software evolving to this beauty. Enveloppes and UI colors looks like ableton in a good way.
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ch_fr34 minutes ago
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.

ramon156about 2 hours ago
Love what Audacity has become, especially the new UI that does not look like it was forced through some scrum pipeline
the_otherabout 2 hours ago
Eh? It looks exactly like it was put through a scrum pipeline.
Mashimoabout 1 hour ago
What does that mean?
_defabout 1 hour ago
While I agree tbf it could be much worse
luckilydiscreteabout 1 hour ago
Whoa what a glow up!
KolmogorovComp39 minutes ago
Looks like most of the timeline editing feature could be successfully ported to Kdenlive (FOSS for video-editing)
fedeb95about 1 hour ago
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.

monegator42 minutes ago
As always, abandoning GTK (or libadwaita. ew.) for Qt is a welcome change. Good for them.
cprecioso37 minutes ago
It was using wxWidgets, not GTK directly IIRC
sph20 minutes ago
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
Joel_Mckay11 minutes ago
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

plucabout 2 hours ago
Audacity and Avidemux have allowed me to look much more skilled in media editing than I have any right to claim
sapiogramabout 1 hour ago
I hope app startup times have been improved, at some this regressed massively, from 0.5s to like 2s.
emursebrianabout 1 hour ago
The new editing features will be pretty useful for sound design.
sph22 minutes ago
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!
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Forgeties7919 minutes ago
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!

shevy-java43 minutes ago
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.

drdexebtjl19 minutes ago
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.
Mashimo36 minutes ago
AFAIK it was just regular usage telemetry. Audacity asks you on start if you want take part now.
_defabout 1 hour ago
Hopefully there will be a selfhostable implementation of their cloud counterpart someday? Maybe only a weekend of vibecoding away.
Joel_Mckay4 minutes ago
just use a modern 'rclone gui' web interface to setup your cloud or sshfs shares. =3
VCFundedGenYer6 minutes ago
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.

Mashimoabout 1 hour ago
What features do you need? Cloud saving?
apercuabout 1 hour ago
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.

SMAAARTabout 2 hours ago
I am sure that Suno would love to buy Audacity.
thuuuomasabout 2 hours ago
Why do you think that is?
basiswordabout 1 hour ago
I imagine the backlash would kill it.
drcongoabout 2 hours ago
Finally looks great!
basiswordabout 1 hour ago
It's been many years since I used Audacity but the interface looks vastly improved.
thinkingtoiletabout 1 hour ago
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.
GaryBlutoabout 2 hours ago
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.
JosephRedfernabout 1 hour ago
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.

drdexebtjl14 minutes ago
Audacity users are not programmers.

Discord is the right platform to get feedback from normies.

sunaookamiabout 1 hour ago
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?
Mashimoabout 1 hour ago
What about the new design do you think is not functional any more compared to version 3?
tontoniusabout 1 hour ago
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

GaryBluto28 minutes ago
I’ve long despised GTK and GIMP in general so I don’t think I’d like any form of its UI.
jamius19about 1 hour ago
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!