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- Hacker News
- 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.by bgribble
- I feel you and that’s why I use tenacity, the spiritual continuation of the original audacity.by archerx
- Is the team funded off audacity merch sales? What's the most effective way for me to support the continuity of their work?by elevation
- As always, abandoning GTK (or libadwaita. ew.) for Qt is a welcome change. Good for them.by monegator
- It was using wxWidgets, not GTK directly IIRCby cprecioso
- 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.
by 2b3a51 - 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!
by Forgeties79 - 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.by MrDOS
- in the age of 500MB apps (thanks to electron); it is refreshing to see a sub-50MB app again.by AbuAssar
- On MacOS is went from 189mb->128mb for v3->v4 which is niceby dmix
- Now that I look at it, why is the arm64 that much smaller then x86_64?
36 vs 47MB
by Mashimo - How big are the project files these days? In the .aup3 format all source material was rendered into one big pile, so with lots of "raw tape" (e.g. for a radio show) the session files became huge. It was annoying to transport an 1.5 GB session file between two machines even via network.
Reaper and Pro Tools (and many other DAWs), in contrast, had the source material in one folder and the session file essentially just documented the edits. These small session files could be exported even via email.
The .aup3 format was one of the reasons why I decided to ditch Audacity3 for radio editing back in the day. And, it used to lag heavily when I had a project with several hundred cuts done via "ripple editing". All this was years ago, though.
I concluded that Audacity v1.2.6 was the high point of this software and, indeed, tried to go back into using that one for a while (in 2019 or 2021 or so)! It was fast enough, very simple, young, raw, robust, but it still had its early 2000s open source enthusiasm charm. :)
As a blast from the past, here's a 2002 publication by the original authors of Audacity on the original file format: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/papers/RBD-papers%20renamed/A%20...
by marttt - Reaper install is 13 megs. I have no idea how is this possible today.
- How's the telemetry situation nowadays? I haven't been updating my copy for a while.by Sophira
- 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.
- Not sure, but since I've installed is as a Flatpak (org.audacityteam.Audacity) I simply disable its network capabilities via com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
This way, even if they had telemetry, I wouldn't really care.
by forevernoob - 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.by _def
- Whatever happened with the post-telemetry fork debacle projects? Tenacity, Sneedacity, or something...
- Someone mentions it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49549040
Seem like they have a few commit every week. 32 Issues closed in a year: https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity/activity/yearly
Looks healthy?
by Mashimo - 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.
- 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.
by boomlinde - 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.by bityard
- 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.by TehCorwiz
- Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based):by dbcooper
- Lost me at QT.by lovedaddy
- 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.by flexagoon
- 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!by skrebbel
- 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?
by dom96 - It should be illegal to announce a UI update and not include at least screenshots, so thanks for sharing.by iLoveOncall