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.
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 :)
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.
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”.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
>> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4
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.
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 :)
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.
This is actually covered in the video. It's the "we should use a chromatic scale" argument and is surprisingly old.
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.
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”.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_sharp
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.
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.
He also hit the nail on the head- reaction videos are just low effort click bait.
He also is guilty of an Internet-ism that is about as low effort click bait as reaction videos:
> AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
Self-aggrandising bullshit.
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.
He, unfortunately, left recently. https://x.com/Tantacrul/status/2092817784782598440
> 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.
Concur. Private equity is synonymous with the concept of maximum extraction in my experience.
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.
Valid point! I believe they weren't.
>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.
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.
EDIT: I know a lot of people from Muse and Native Instruments and that's the impression a lot seem to have.
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!
>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.
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.
Damn this guy is well versed on the topic at hand. Really clear and nice video.
Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM
It should be illegal to announce a UI update and not include at least screenshots, so thanks for sharing.
The URL should probably be its landing page, which does a good job with the overview: https://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-4/
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!
Best thing is it's not just a new coat of paint; there seem to be some very significant usability improvements in here.
Delicious really is a great word! It looks gorgeous and so pleasant to use.
Yeah, it is a hand-made video! Someone put actual work into it. :-) Results are speaking.
Lost me at QT.
Why do you care so much about the UI framework used?
He sells RAM so he only likes extremely bloated and slow electron apps.
Or he just prefers GTK. I sure like it better than QT.
No person who has written software with both prefers GTK :D
I can still use and develop GTK2 software in Debian out-of-the-box, but not Qt3 or even Qt4.
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.
> so difficult to upgrade to new versions
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.
How many commits did you previously contribute to Audacity? Unless the answer is different from 0 I don't think your opinion matters at all.
Whatever happened with the post-telemetry fork debacle projects? Tenacity, Sneedacity, or something...
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?
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 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 :)
Yep that was my thought as well. Most DAWs default to a very quick cross fade when joining two clips for this very reason.
I didn't even know I wanted this! Always nice to see a great product made even better.
How's the telemetry situation nowadays? I haven't been updating my copy for a while.
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.
So even after the intense backlash Tantacrul saw on the GH threads, they went ahead and stuffed it full of telemetry anyway. Incredible.
He is pro age-verification with government IDs, what do you expect?
Did he state this in a video somewhere? I checked a couple biography pages but didn't see this specifically called out.
Please cite this if it's true.
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.
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.
in the age of 500MB apps (thanks to electron); it is refreshing to see a sub-50MB app again.
Reaper install is 13 megs. I have no idea how is this possible today.
Because they're good
can just swap electron for tauri for example
Or you know… build a proper app.
Now that I look at it, why is the arm64 that much smaller then x86_64?
36 vs 47MB
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.
Is the team funded off audacity merch sales? What's the most effective way for me to support the continuity of their work?
As always, abandoning GTK (or libadwaita. ew.) for Qt is a welcome change. Good for them.
It was using wxWidgets, not GTK directly IIRC
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
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
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].
[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...
>Qt 6 build system is vastly easier to work with.
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.
> =3
What in the Neopets hell is this.
They went over why switching to Qt was the best option for their team here: https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38?t=840 .
I actually alluded to the design choice compromise in my post. But thank you =3
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.
Could also look at https://quasar.dev/ if you do rapid release cycles. =3
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.
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/
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.
Simple solution here, use a high quality OS.
What do you recommend for destructive editing which is open-source ?
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.
>> 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.
LADSPA sounds pretty critical; did they really ship with that missing?
LADSPA v1 is ancient and fundamentally quite broken, and that's what they dropped. Audacity 4 ships with LV2 (i.e. LADSPA v2) support.
FWIW I don't think I've used a v1 LADSPA plugin for a decade.
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.
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 feel you and that’s why I use tenacity, the spiritual continuation of the original audacity.
Love to see a winamp-era software evolving to this beauty. Enveloppes and UI colors looks like ableton in a good way.
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.
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.
Love what Audacity has become, especially the new UI that does not look like it was forced through some scrum pipeline
Eh? It looks exactly like it was put through a scrum pipeline.
What does that mean?
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.
While I agree tbf it could be much worse
I hope aup4 is smaller than aup3, because my number one headache with Audacity is file size bloat. Otherwise I love it!
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.
Wow, the UX has come a long way, can't wait to try it.
What is MuseHub and how is Audacity related to it?
Whoa what a glow up!
Audacity and Avidemux have allowed me to look much more skilled in media editing than I have any right to claim
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.
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.
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.
Looks like most of the timeline editing feature could be successfully ported to Kdenlive (FOSS for video-editing)
Hopefully there will be a selfhostable implementation of their cloud counterpart someday? Maybe only a weekend of vibecoding away.
What features do you need? Cloud saving?
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.
But how will I get my dopamine hits without vibe coding?
just use a modern 'rclone gui' web interface to setup your cloud or sshfs shares. =3
I hope app startup times have been improved, at some this regressed massively, from 0.5s to like 2s.
So many 2002 Cool Edit Pro 2.0 vibes!
The new editing features will be pretty useful for sound design.
I am sure that Suno would love to buy Audacity.
Why do you think that is?
I imagine the backlash would kill it.
It's GPL; it would be forked immediately and business as usual.
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.
Most pro audio recorders come with a free desktop Steinberg Cubase license card.
On MacOS it is probably one of the better options for lossless workflows. =3
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.
AFAIK it was just regular usage telemetry. Audacity asks you on start if you want take part now.
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.
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.
Finally looks great!
But where is the AI pfft
It's been many years since I used Audacity but the interface looks vastly improved.
> some controls have moved or changed
The audacity! /s
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.
wxWidgets uses the native OS interfaces. They have a valid point about Qt sometimes breaking things, and should be packaged as an audacity-qt6 fork.
Your perspective is also valid, in that it could be phrased a little kinder. =3
> wxWidgets uses the native OS interfaces.
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?
What about the new design do you think is not functional any more compared to version 3?
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
It does not read like op is using about potential qt problems, rather current ux.
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
I’ve long despised GTK and GIMP in general so I don’t think I’d like any form of its UI.
Audacity users are not programmers.
Discord is the right platform to get feedback from normies.
> Very disappointed to see a program I remembered fondly for its native-feeling interface and functional
But it used wxWidgets, so by definition, NOT native interface
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!