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.
I find conventional Western notation works quite well for communicating notes, rhythms, and basic expression, but it breaks down pretty quickly once you move beyond that. E.g. a lot of the common techniques on electric guitar (bends, palm muting, tremolo/whammy bar stuff, pick slides, slap/thumping, pinch harmonics, raking) don't really have a convenient notational shorthand. That's without even mentioning synthesizers (how do you notate 'gradually increase the filter cutoff here'?) and DAWs, samplers, drum machines. But it's definitely a hard problem: the more information you try to shove into a notational system, the harder it gets for people to keep track of what everything means. Plus you just start running out of easily distinguishable symbols at some point.
I'm not sure what you are talking about wrt guitar and standard notation. Finger (PIMA) indication, staccato/legato, vibrato, tremolo, slurs, hammer, pulls, etc...it's all there. I don't see as much notation around hammer/pull as a classical player, but pick up a classical guitar music book sometime...you'll find that everything (guitar-related) you mentioned needing to be included, is already included.
Not sure what you consider convenient, but I’ve never had a problem reading electric guitar notation. It’s handled the same way we notate extended technique for other instruments - a combination of text above the staff, and squiggly lines on it :)
What?! I'm surprised those are the things you complain about regarding guitar sheet music.
The only real problem is guitar always has several different ways to play the same notes all over the neck and instrument tuning isn't always specified either.
Standard tuning may not work and tabs sometimes aren't there alongside the staff. If you're trying to sight read, you'll guess alright for a while until you are suddenly forced to make heroic leaps to the other end of the neck or painfully contort your fingers just so you don't miss a beat.
> Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard
Interestingly, the current form of a piano keyboard isn't only way keyed instruments have been laid out.
My mind was blown when I first saw a harpsichord with separate flat and sharp keys for example because I never considered the concept. I grew up with pianos so in my ignorance I never really thought about them being different.
The fundamental problem in music notation is that it was designed for an 8 note system and we use a 12 note system. It's.. fine I guess, they got those extra four notes in there and millions of people read music with no problems. But it does create a lot of confusion for novice readers who now think those 8 notes are somehow more important than the other 4 or that the sharps and flats are somehow half notes(they are not, all 12 are equally spaced on a log scale) and don't even get me started on the confusing terminology, there are 12 notes in an octet, semitones? a fifth? a fifth of what? it is seven notes or 3/2's there is no 5.
With regard to the piano keyboard, again not terrible, but it definitely is a compromise to fit the mechanical needs of the piano. I really like the design of the chromatic keyboard(ever see an accordion with the big hex grid of buttons, this is a chromatic keyboard), it has the advantage that whatever key you play a song in it has the same fingering, on a piano every key has different fingering, so there is a big skill barrier to changing keys that interferes with employment of such a critical aspect of playing.
A lot of Chesterton’s Fence going on here… I remember thinking this way when I still had a pretty low-level understanding of music (like, “I’m reading arbitrary pitches and pushing the matching keys on the piano”), but once I started understanding bigger musical concepts/chunks, the reason for the notation became clearer, and now I see why it’s a pretty good local maximum for readability.
The majority of music uses a system of intervals called the major scale, which is seven notes with a particular spacing that is determined largely by psychoacoustics (that is, we didn’t just make it up). That spacing can be shifted around to any point on the underlying 12-note system, which gives different keys/modes. On any single piece of music you’re typically using only one of those, so those seven notes are the “skeleton” underlying it all. This is what it means to say “this piece is in D major”. (BTW, a fifth is the fifth note in the major scale, so yes, there is a 5!)
Standard notation privileges these modes of the major scale, which means (assuming you know how to play all the major scales on your instrument) there’s a 1:1 mapping from places on the staff to scale degrees. That means most of the time you’re reading straight off the score into the scale your fingers have memorized.
The key signature is what makes this work. You can even instantly transpose by ignoring the written key signature and reading in another key. Chords are also made readable because they’re usually based on thirds, which happens to be the interval that makes the notes stack up exactly next to each other, so a triad, seventh chord, etc. is instantly recognizable.
So basically the notation is optimized for the common case (the music is using notes from a mode of the major scale) and makes exceptions (accidentals) stand out.
And yes, pianos are a pain because all the (musical) keys are different on the (physical) keys. However, pianos are great because all the octaves look exactly alike (so finding all the Ds on the keyboard is trivial). Stringed instruments like guitars or violins are the opposite: all the (musical) key fingerings are the same, but you have to memorize the positions of all the notes because they all look the same. Pick your poison.
I'll watch the video later but is it more difficult for singers or musicians of particular instruments?
For example, if you number the tones and have a piano style instrument with alternating white and black keys, then you can have a 6 line stave where spaces are always white keys and black keys are always lines.
I think the argument is that it gets harder to recognise tonal intervals the further they get apart on the stave.
When sight reading chords pianists, for example, don't really think about every note in the chord.
Instead if you recognise the intervals between the tones and the root you can just place your hand without thinking about it too much.
Since most of the time you're in a single musical key you don't need see every tone separately. You can still flatten, sharpen or normal and you can represent key changes too.
There are other details such as beginners often already using numbers to indicate preferred fingering. I guess that's not a big thing but if you use numbers as part of an alternative system you have to cover all of the edge cases and extensions.
Oh, just remembered another reason. Having a more compact staves means you can represent more musical parts on the same page which is important in orchestral situations where you might want to see what others are doing as you play.
I've thought the same, but as I really started to play and compose some music, it became clear that we almost exclusively use 5-7 note systems within a part of a music piece, and accidentals give great hints about what's going on musically. There is no need to use whole 12 semitones on the staff all the time
The problem with linnstrument and similar things is exactly equality of any note, it's not easy to think like "ok, here we move to another key, so we have to add one sharp here" on a controller like that. For me, even on a guitar I have to "see" the notes to play well and understand what I'm playing, so I had to learn "white keys" on the fretboard, and on top of that, learn octave numbers for each note, only then it really works for me and it's still hard compared to the keyboard where you see all sharps and flats and can treat them as you like. That's more important than using the same muscle memory imo
> semitones? a fifth? a fifth of what? it is seven notes or 3/2's there is no 5.
I learned to read sheet music as a kid by my mom taking me to piano lessons. I cannot play the piano but I know where the notes are that correspond to the sheet music. I parlayed that into learning to play woodwinds when I got older. Even that was just enough to have fun. Nothing about it was me being serious about being a musician. So when other students would talk about 5ths and 3rds, I was totally lost. Then someone just said transpose the note up/down 5 notes (or 3 or whatever). They said it confidently, and they were first chair, so I went with it. I've never needed to know it, as I just play the notes as written on the sheet. I've never gigged where I had to play different keys.
But yeah, the fifth nomenclature confused the hell out of me too
To sum up: you don’t like the current notation system, terminology and piano keys but also don’t have anything else to add to the discussion other than “I don’t like it”.
It is sort of like english spelling, we all know spelling in english sucks(So pointlessly difficult we have contests centered around the skill), we also all know we can do nothing to fix it. Still gonna complain about it however.
To me it's worse because you have to know which version of English. Is it grey or gray, color or colour, shop or shoppe? At least boot is spelled boot even if it is the trunk.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Private equity gets a bad rap in large part because the stories they're most famous for are the "PE buys a failing company, and the company subsequently finally fails," with the "failing" word conspicuously absent in most retellings. I'm not sure I've heard one of those stories where the company failed after being acquired by PE where it wasn't already failing before the PE takeover...
What PE loves to do (and where I think a lot of the vibe comes from) is buying companies from owners who care about the craft and turning them into companies that care about nothing but money.
Let's say you make an app for first responders. Being a former first responder, you know exactly what your users need and what the workflows should be like. Your app becomes a brand name in the community. You charge enough to survive (if that), because your app is a labour of love more than anything else.
Eventually, family and other responsibilities get in the way, and you just no longer have the time or motivation to maintain the app any more. You sell to "we so swear we are not private equity" Applause.
As soon as you do that, the app gets taken over by financiers and developers who are experts at "revenue optimization", with little domain knowledge about what first responders need. They calculate (probably correctly) that they can milk their customers for a lot more if they move to a subscription plan, gate some features behind expensive premium packages, stuff the app full of upsell pop-ups and fill it with analytics SDKs that tell them which features are worth spending development time on, and which can safely be removed.
For me, private equity gets a bad rep because they've bought up all of the local mom and pop shops for just about any service I need thats face to face. All of the plumbers, electricians, general contractors, vets, grocery chains, coffee shops, and other shit were bought and had every ounce of revenue squeezed out of them. The result? All of the things I need locally cost 3-5x they did and the service is far worse.
And as a quick edit: none of these examples I have were of failing businesses. Each of the owners had their reasons, but none was due to it being necessary for survival. PE on hackernews tends to focus on software/bigger purchases, but so much of the damage in my opinion is on the local and smaller scale.
Well, many things may be going wrong before PE gets involved, or the owners may be retiring and it just will never be the same again even if PE didn't buy. So it's more likely to feel like bad news even if it was still a reasonable outcome.
As a public, well-known example, Dell being taken private in 2013 seemed to work out.
I'd guess the majority of those success stories are invisible to the end user.
e.g. simply keeping the company afloat via PE cash.
If I recall correctly, this is what happened to Hilton Hotels. They were collapsing during the housing crisis.
A slightly different scenario but Hertz is a PE success story. It was owned by Ford and bought by a private equity firm. Now it's a standalone company making mint.
Were those roll-ups though? I see a poster below says the private equity fund was only involved for the last acquisition, but no one can deny Muse Group/Ultimate Guitar went on a shopping spree. They looked like they were trying to gain control over a whole segment and start squeezing (well, except for that open source projects aren't that easy to squeeze). No wonder people freaked out over the telemetry, it was reasonable to fear the worst. But everything went better than expected.
>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.
Most enshittification I am familiar with is because I read it in the news, therefore if non-shittification does happen it is likely I do not hear about it. I suppose the same holds true for other people.
If you were correct and people just had to hear about it then people wouldn't go around worrying about violent crime, because of always seeing on the news, despite it having fallen to historic lows. Instead people should be just walking around talking about how safe and non-violent the streets are nowadays.
This site is a lot like how I remember ultimate guitar, being that you can look up tabs and access them. I hope people keep uploading more tabs because ultimate still has a larger volume
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!
Yes, because GTK2 is so difficult to upgrade to new versions, whereas Qt4 to Qt5 usually only involved replacing a few identifiers (cannot speak to Qt6 since I don't do Qt anymore). That's why distros need to drag GTK2 along even though we are already at GTK4.
I work on the IUP fork, where I have and support the Qt driver, which works with both Qt5 and Qt6, and I only need a couple of checks to make it work on both. I often check if I broke the Qt5 build; nope, all good there, hard to break. For GTK3 and GTK4, those must be separate drivers; there's no way you can handle that with a couple of checks. Everything is different. That was possible to some extent and works with GTK2/GTK3 (single driver), but there are so many checks and workarounds there. Qt is so nice to work with.
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?
There were a bunch of minor versions between 3.0 and 4.0 made up of fundamental refactor work to establish separation of concerns. As I understand it from the call graphs he shared, the problem was that the UI was reaching deep into the audio code directly instead of using a clear API boundary to separate concerns and route commands and change state. So fundamentally while the UI worked, it also was deeply entwined with the audio engine and changing any of the audio back-end basically broke things downstream in unexpected places and couldn't be swapped without deep UI work anyway. So, if you're going to have to rewrite your UI layer to disentangle it from your back-end anyway why not also bring it up to speed? Let me repeat that to be clearer: The UI had to be changed internally in fundamental ways to do any work on the audio back-end and they chose to also uplift the design and UX while making it easier to replace the audio engine in a future commit.
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.
Yeah, every software/hardware seems to deal with this differently. The sampler I use the most (Octatrack) only jumps by zero-crossings when holding SHIFT, otherwise lets you freely create entirely new pops and cracks in your songs :)
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 just learned to do fade-in/out for everything. Maybe I did something incorrectly.
This is the de-facto standard practice for fixing/working around that particular issue, so I don't think it's incorrect at all :) Besides, however you fix an issue and it sounds good, it's correct :)
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.
If they don't have to re-code half the app (new UI kit, not required features, etc.) then what does it matter if they are 10k unrelated commits behind?
I like it's there as a choice for us who prefer the old-timey Audacity for some quick sample editing.
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.
> Wow. @Meta settled for $18B, also agreeing to implement significant protections for teens. They'll of course choose the weakest / least effective implementation possible but even so - governments are beginning to force change.
>
>2 years ago, it looked hopeless. Big moment.
That Tweet shows that he is pro "protecting minors from social media", and "governments should do that protecting"
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.
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.
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
My understanding is that the Qt 6 build system is vastly easier to work with.
Also, Audacity is not the first major FOSS project to successfully migrate from wxWidgets to Qt: Dolphin, the GameCube/Wii emulator, made a similar migration several years ago[0][1][2][3].
The Audacity team imported their existing Qt interface code from a previous project. Depending on the design, the code smell could have a lot of vestigial parts unrelated to the new project.
I have always seen FOSS as the last stop for public domain software. It is supposed to become the stable road future kids walk down to become professionals. The Qt framework is often antithetical to that goal in my opinion. =3
Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility.
I don't know, it took me a while to get used to but i actually prefer Qt6+CMake over Qt5. Porting the first application was kind of a nightmare due to how many things i had to change.. though they were code smells to begin with, now everything run smoothly.
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 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'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 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.
it might be ancient, but it's also very simple. it's relatively easy to import a single header and write a working plug-in, which makes it attractive for enthusiasts.
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
Should watch the pre release video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
If what they're saying is true, this project is very much a pile of tech debt. They need to migrate whatever they can early before continuing work on the audio engine.
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.
I think what they mean is it looks like a hodgepodge of different DAWs, aka: designed by a committee who's only point of references are features in other done software. It doesn't look like it has its own visual identity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Audacity was fooling no one that it was a native MacOS app, or even a particularly well designed GTK app. The fundamental idea of WX is not sound. Turns out MFC is not a great abstraction for AppKit.
Even Qt uses some higher level native UI interfaces on its respective implementations.
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
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
> 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
Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard which is also extremely convenient thing to play compared to other stuff, even to grid controllers.
The only real problem is guitar always has several different ways to play the same notes all over the neck and instrument tuning isn't always specified either.
Standard tuning may not work and tabs sometimes aren't there alongside the staff. If you're trying to sight read, you'll guess alright for a while until you are suddenly forced to make heroic leaps to the other end of the neck or painfully contort your fingers just so you don't miss a beat.
Interestingly, the current form of a piano keyboard isn't only way keyed instruments have been laid out.
My mind was blown when I first saw a harpsichord with separate flat and sharp keys for example because I never considered the concept. I grew up with pianos so in my ignorance I never really thought about them being different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_sharp
With regard to the piano keyboard, again not terrible, but it definitely is a compromise to fit the mechanical needs of the piano. I really like the design of the chromatic keyboard(ever see an accordion with the big hex grid of buttons, this is a chromatic keyboard), it has the advantage that whatever key you play a song in it has the same fingering, on a piano every key has different fingering, so there is a big skill barrier to changing keys that interferes with employment of such a critical aspect of playing.
The majority of music uses a system of intervals called the major scale, which is seven notes with a particular spacing that is determined largely by psychoacoustics (that is, we didn’t just make it up). That spacing can be shifted around to any point on the underlying 12-note system, which gives different keys/modes. On any single piece of music you’re typically using only one of those, so those seven notes are the “skeleton” underlying it all. This is what it means to say “this piece is in D major”. (BTW, a fifth is the fifth note in the major scale, so yes, there is a 5!)
Standard notation privileges these modes of the major scale, which means (assuming you know how to play all the major scales on your instrument) there’s a 1:1 mapping from places on the staff to scale degrees. That means most of the time you’re reading straight off the score into the scale your fingers have memorized.
The key signature is what makes this work. You can even instantly transpose by ignoring the written key signature and reading in another key. Chords are also made readable because they’re usually based on thirds, which happens to be the interval that makes the notes stack up exactly next to each other, so a triad, seventh chord, etc. is instantly recognizable.
So basically the notation is optimized for the common case (the music is using notes from a mode of the major scale) and makes exceptions (accidentals) stand out.
And yes, pianos are a pain because all the (musical) keys are different on the (physical) keys. However, pianos are great because all the octaves look exactly alike (so finding all the Ds on the keyboard is trivial). Stringed instruments like guitars or violins are the opposite: all the (musical) key fingerings are the same, but you have to memorize the positions of all the notes because they all look the same. Pick your poison.
The answer to why people don't use a chromatic scale is also in there. Very roughy, it's harder to sight read intervals between notes.
Standard music notation is a like a London Underground map, it's symbolic rather than literal.
Being more symbolic gives standard notation many advantages once you learn it.
The video does a much better job of explaining that than I've given. It really is very good.
For example, if you number the tones and have a piano style instrument with alternating white and black keys, then you can have a 6 line stave where spaces are always white keys and black keys are always lines.
When sight reading chords pianists, for example, don't really think about every note in the chord.
Instead if you recognise the intervals between the tones and the root you can just place your hand without thinking about it too much.
Since most of the time you're in a single musical key you don't need see every tone separately. You can still flatten, sharpen or normal and you can represent key changes too.
There are other details such as beginners often already using numbers to indicate preferred fingering. I guess that's not a big thing but if you use numbers as part of an alternative system you have to cover all of the edge cases and extensions.
Oh, just remembered another reason. Having a more compact staves means you can represent more musical parts on the same page which is important in orchestral situations where you might want to see what others are doing as you play.
The problem with linnstrument and similar things is exactly equality of any note, it's not easy to think like "ok, here we move to another key, so we have to add one sharp here" on a controller like that. For me, even on a guitar I have to "see" the notes to play well and understand what I'm playing, so I had to learn "white keys" on the fretboard, and on top of that, learn octave numbers for each note, only then it really works for me and it's still hard compared to the keyboard where you see all sharps and flats and can treat them as you like. That's more important than using the same muscle memory imo
*7 note system
It's called an "octave" because the 8th note is considered another instance of the 1st.
I learned to read sheet music as a kid by my mom taking me to piano lessons. I cannot play the piano but I know where the notes are that correspond to the sheet music. I parlayed that into learning to play woodwinds when I got older. Even that was just enough to have fun. Nothing about it was me being serious about being a musician. So when other students would talk about 5ths and 3rds, I was totally lost. Then someone just said transpose the note up/down 5 notes (or 3 or whatever). They said it confidently, and they were first chair, so I went with it. I've never needed to know it, as I just play the notes as written on the sheet. I've never gigged where I had to play different keys.
But yeah, the fifth nomenclature confused the hell out of me too
Ultimately standard notation is still the best we have.
- 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)
His other videos are awesome too. He is an expert in making great software AND a great video creator.
> AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
Self-aggrandising bullshit.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Let's say you make an app for first responders. Being a former first responder, you know exactly what your users need and what the workflows should be like. Your app becomes a brand name in the community. You charge enough to survive (if that), because your app is a labour of love more than anything else.
Eventually, family and other responsibilities get in the way, and you just no longer have the time or motivation to maintain the app any more. You sell to "we so swear we are not private equity" Applause.
As soon as you do that, the app gets taken over by financiers and developers who are experts at "revenue optimization", with little domain knowledge about what first responders need. They calculate (probably correctly) that they can milk their customers for a lot more if they move to a subscription plan, gate some features behind expensive premium packages, stuff the app full of upsell pop-ups and fill it with analytics SDKs that tell them which features are worth spending development time on, and which can safely be removed.
And as a quick edit: none of these examples I have were of failing businesses. Each of the owners had their reasons, but none was due to it being necessary for survival. PE on hackernews tends to focus on software/bigger purchases, but so much of the damage in my opinion is on the local and smaller scale.
As a public, well-known example, Dell being taken private in 2013 seemed to work out.
e.g. simply keeping the company afloat via PE cash.
If I recall correctly, this is what happened to Hilton Hotels. They were collapsing during the housing crisis.
A slightly different scenario but Hertz is a PE success story. It was owned by Ford and bought by a private equity firm. Now it's a standalone company making mint.
Most enshittification I am familiar with is because I read it in the news, therefore if non-shittification does happen it is likely I do not hear about it. I suppose the same holds true for other people.
If you were correct and people just had to hear about it then people wouldn't go around worrying about violent crime, because of always seeing on the news, despite it having fallen to historic lows. Instead people should be just walking around talking about how safe and non-violent the streets are nowadays.
This site is a lot like how I remember ultimate guitar, being that you can look up tabs and access them. I hope people keep uploading more tabs because ultimate still has a larger volume
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.
Well he said that Sibelius was the best for serious musicians, it just had a horrible UI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM
1: https://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-4/
Is there a free open source tool for video editing that has the same UX chops?
I think this may be the first time I've wanted to buy merch
https://merch.audacityteam.org/
Perhaps, because GTK developers insist, that GTK2, GTK3, GTK4 are different toolkits.
> Qt4 to Qt5 usually only involved ...
I'd start with Qt3 to Qt4.
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.
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.
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.
This is the de-facto standard practice for fixing/working around that particular issue, so I don't think it's incorrect at all :) Besides, however you fix an issue and it sounds good, it's correct :)
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?
I like it's there as a choice for us who prefer the old-timey Audacity for some quick sample editing.
I seem to remember at the time the plan was to pull all changes from Audacity across but not the team/company behind it.
Here's an alternative for those unaware:
https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity
https://archive.ph/LFfO1
That Tweet shows that he is pro "protecting minors from social media", and "governments should do that protecting"
As far as I can tell they're updating the much dated UX from being stuck in the 90's and are making great strides on the app.
I'm fine with them making money as they're investing into a utility I use.
36 vs 47MB
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.
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
Also, Audacity is not the first major FOSS project to successfully migrate from wxWidgets to Qt: Dolphin, the GameCube/Wii emulator, made a similar migration several years ago[0][1][2][3].
[0]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/06/03/dolphin-progress-rep...
[1]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/02/03/dolphin-progress-rep...
[2]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/05/02/legend-dolphin-lens-...
[3]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/07/06/dolphin-progress-rep...
The Audacity team imported their existing Qt interface code from a previous project. Depending on the design, the code smell could have a lot of vestigial parts unrelated to the new project.
I have always seen FOSS as the last stop for public domain software. It is supposed to become the stable road future kids walk down to become professionals. The Qt framework is often antithetical to that goal in my opinion. =3
Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility.
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/
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.
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.
FWIW I don't think I've used a v1 LADSPA plugin for a decade.
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.
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.
Using this for my webcam background moving forward!
P.S.: I don't care for looks, but UX seems better. I will try it.
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!
What is MuseHub and how is Audacity related to it?
Still a good move, and everyone wins!
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.
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.
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 always thought audacity was great, and still prefer its workflow to slow tools or logic. I haven’t ever tried Reaper however.
On MacOS it is probably one of the better options for lossless workflows. =3
The audacity! /s
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.
Your perspective is also valid, in that it could be phrased a little kinder. =3
Audacity was fooling no one that it was a native MacOS app, or even a particularly well designed GTK app. The fundamental idea of WX is not sound. Turns out MFC is not a great abstraction for AppKit.
Even Qt uses some higher level native UI interfaces on its respective implementations.
Discord is the right platform to get feedback from normies.
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
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
God forbid someone actually improves a software!
But it used wxWidgets, so by definition, NOT native interface