this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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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.