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
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.
Unrelated question, but what’s the DE in the screenshot? Looks super clean
Gnome with the dock-to-panel extension.
It looks like Gnome.
Just speculation, but Deepin?
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.
Didn’t Audacity already have pitch shifting? Or did they improve the algorithm? If the latter is true, this is very exciting to me
