this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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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
I don't know a whole lot about what Audacity is up to these days, but the same company owns MuseScore, and it sounds like they're doing kinda similar things in terms of monetisation. The core software itself is still free, but there are optional cloud services on top of that which you can pay for.
I don't see what's wrong with this. Cloud services provide a convenience. Some people like that convenience and are willing to pay for it. Others might be perfectly ok doing it themselves and won't pay.
It helps that the new head of design for both of these products is a guy who really knows his shit. He's already taken MuseScore from an application that nobody in their right mind would use if they could afford the commercial competitors, to a legitimately great music engraving application, and he's been on Audacity too since 2021.
The problem lies in the fact that these services are completely proprietary and are an example of service as a software substitute.
Foss should encourage privacy and freedom. Cloud storage doesn't normally do that. What's worse it it often requires non free libraries to be included which is a no no
Then don't use it? It's that simple. If it makes money for them and some users like it, there's nothing wrong with that.
But it is baked in
It's free software so you can get rid of it if you want. It's not really for the users of a free software project to dictate the direction the project should take, perhaps unless they have made substantial contributions
I tried Audacity before that and couldn't migrate from adobe's aquired CoolEditPro (Au versions before modern redesign). Have it changed much since then? I'm yet to find an alternative (video editing tools just doesn't make it, although they get recommended) and as I can recall Audacity had an interface that's not as easy to use.
I couldn't tell you for sure, because I don't use it or its commercial competition very much. That said, personally when I have needed to use it, I've always found the gap between Audacity and its pro equivalents in terms of basic usability to be much lower than in other creative fields. GIMP, in particular, is nigh unusable compared to Photoshop.
If you're interested in seeing more, here's a video where the new lead announced that he was taking it over. And the official Audacity YouTube channel has been posting overviews of its updates since then. I think it likely that the first two updates (3.1 and 3.2) contain some of the most critical functionality.
Audacity doesn't come anywhere close to professional DAWs like Audition and it's not really trying to be one afaik. Ardour is the way to go for professional needs.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
here's a video where the new lead announced that he was taking it over
the official Audacity YouTube channel
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
https://tenacityaudio.org/
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.