What Ever Happened to Audacity?
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- Опубліковано 4 лип 2024
- If you're up-to-date on your open-source drama, you might remember the drama that went down a couple of years ago when the audio editor Audacity was purchased by Muse Group. Right away they started making terrible decision after terrible decision, to the point that people in the FOSS world were calling Audacity spyware. But now that the dust has settled, is Audacity really dead? Is it safe to use? What ever happened to all the Audacity forks like Tenacity? Let's get to the bottom of it in this video...
Tenacity's repo: codeberg.org/tenacityteam/ten...
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0:00 The drama
2:16 What about the telemetry?
4:41 What about the weird privacy policy changes?
5:20 What about the license?
7:31 What's new with Audacity?
9:19 What about the Audacity forks?
11:55 What should you use? - Наука та технологія
If open-source users would occasionally donate to their favorite software, the maintainers wouldn't have to sell themselves.
Blender gets donations and grants all the time. Other open-source software users need to step up their game.
@@davidrozier1126 Thing is Blender also has big names like AMD and Nvidia behind it as well. Idk how much it matters, just though I'd mention it.
That isn't how the real world works man. If a million people had donated 1 dollar, thats a million dollars. If an outside company sees that those same 1 million people actually do that regularly or at higher intervals and their financials which disclosure the revenue history of their product/service is stable . . . all it takes it some random company with VC money to do a take over. They can buy out the owners. They can razz them up on yachts or fancy vacations if they do not submit. They can hire a tech firm with crypto or through a slush investment pool to obscure their actions and take them offline for extended periods. This could instead be through expensive court action, frivolous copyright and patent trolling is the NORM not the exception. Open-Source maintainers who see 7 or 8 figures or even a blank check with a guarantee that they can retire would be insane to NOT take it in our current climate. It sucks, but thats the reality of it. There are NO cases where open-source is safe from hostile c-suite take overs, we havent regulated our economy properly in over 5 decades. Look at what Redhat just did by pay walling their hybrid open source, but private enterprise solution. They had the ideal model where 1 part of the product was open and then they charged for enterprise solutions and support. If people can make EASY money, there is nothing in our social makeup anymore that appears to inhibit it besides a total mass exodus of users, revenue, and substantial legal troubles.
Lol, aperently there are ppl and companies who complain and harass the devs.
@@davidrozier1126 yes, if a foss software is focused around basic users who doesnt even know what open-source is (like krita for example) then their main selling-point should be the fact that the software is completely free with no ads and donation is the only revenue they'll get
"If you're on windows or macos you've bigger things yo worry about than audacity", laughed hard
@CannedCoochie the problem is if you're using those OS you're already sending companies your data to begin with
Yeah Microsoft gets lots of data from my air gapped windows 7 pc
What is there to worry about on Mac OS?
Stop using Home/Pro machines, you can't disable telemetry on those.
Education and Enterprise let's you fully disable telemetry, people are ignorant.
@@amogoose2971Bruh you’re on UA-cam
I haven't updated Audacity for something like five years. I assumed it was just laziness, but it turns out to be strategic laziness
If I don't update it, will it not ask for my personal information? I mean all the extra info it could get anyways
1.2.6, baby !!
Or, instead of dealing with any of the issues, you could just download a older version, im still on 3.2.2, no update prompts, no issues at all. Ive always used audacity for uni/college work which ive needed audio files for. If your really concerned about it, compile it yourself from the open-source files, im sure you can quite easily go through the files used to compile it and remove any lines relating to telemetry.
Same here, I am just using an old version myself.
You could do a Tube showing that, sounds good.
an older version is also fine for me… only use Audacity for light editing of some live recordings….
I use an older version as well. Also, I use an older version of Sound Forge, which is nearly identical to Audacity (so much so that it seems like Audacity authors were inspired by it).
The average user can't do that.
Despite the community's reception, I don't think anything can really usurp Audacity's position, and if MuseScore 4 is any indication, they do have a talented team (if relatively small) capable of making updates that appeals to the normal users who don't care about the FOSS and Privacy community's concerns.
How abt cakewalk DAW?
Monkey paw situation "man I want this software to become very good"
Gets adquired by musegroup and suddenly becomes corporate as fuck
@@jirehla-ab1671 that doesn't exist anymore lmao
@@illford6921 wait what happened
@@illford6921 it does, it was just bought by bandlab and made free. its honestly pretty good if you need a free DAW.
This was my first audio editor, but after the acquisition I moved onto Repear. Pretty powerful and I'm happy with the feature set.
Interesting, never heard of it. I'll have to check it out.
REAPER is a complete DAW. Audacity is not comparable to it. Also REAPER is not FOSS.
@@helloimatapir yeah i use both reaper and audacity it depends on the tool i need for the job
@@EricMurphyxyz the difference between reaper and audacity is that one is a real DAW, the other is in the more amateur side of things.
i mean yeah no shit, you went from an audio recorder to a full fledged daw, thats like being surprised that Ableton is better than the voice recorder on your iphone
I cannot believe their audacity to change the privacy policy 😱
I see what you did there.
@@TheEDFLegacy 🤪🤪
🥁🥁 tss
@@AndMod WOW. THANKS. SO. MUCH. BEEP. BEEP. 🤖
Hahahahaha, good one!
I felt so much excitement when Tantacrul announced he was going to be working on Audacity (if you haven't heard of him or watched his UA-cam videos about UX, you should, they're great - start with the one about Sibelius). But then the first thing to happen was all this controversial stuff. To his and Muse's credit, they knew they messed up and very quickly backtracked on most of the controversial decisions. The fact is, Audacity's interface is utter crap. People use it because it's free and/or they don't know any better, but it's so painful to use if you've ever used audio software with a *good* interface. If anyone can make it better, Tantacrul can, although it seems to be taking a long time... Frankly I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be better to bin it and start again. The trouble is a lot of Audacity users now have Stockholm Syndrome and will complain about any significant changes, but so much of the interface is badly designed that it really needs significant changes rather than tinkering around the edges.
great thing about FOSS is that people can (a) download older versions of the software, and (b) port new features back to old versions with the shitty UI. i’m sure that a “shitty UI” fork will be created immediately after any major update and stay in step with the main fork of the app
This right here is the correct opinion. Plus after watching Tantacrul's videos on user testing, I can totally see why telemetry would be a valuable feature - you can actually see where the most users have the most problems, and if you're a good developer, those are the first problems you'll fix. That's why I always leave telemetry on in my professional software, it helps the software get better.
Once people get used to a particular audio editing program and its layout they don't want to change. Most people will stick with whichever program they learned first, regardless of whether there are better programs. It's the same with video editing software to a large degree. Not everyone, obviously, but most people, even some who do that stuff for a living.
Yeah, Audacity isn't a very good looking program and the layout is kind of a pain. Coming from using GoldWave, Audition and Reaper, Audacity feels like a huge step back in that regard. It's a powerful program, but the GUI is so crap that it feels like it can't do much a lot of the time. It's like going from Photoshop to GIMP. Thankfully I only had to use it a couple of times to convert a file format that wasn't compatible with GoldWave. The announcement that Tantacrul was gonna work on this made me excited to check it out again, but it feels it hasn't really gone anywhere yet.
@@thecianinator IMO good and honest telemetry will go a long way including publishing the results
Unfortunate this happened. I personally only used audacity a couple times, but I respect how well made it was.
Cant believe they have the "audacity" to do this.
I mean it's still alive and well, I don't exactly believe Audacity in its current form is dead
@Eric Murphy I really just wanted to make that pun, I will not lie lol.
@@kyledavison1137 It was a good pun not gonna lie
6:42 I don't understand, how can they do this? Doesn't the GPL "infect" all the code licensed under it, to where it can't be used in proprietary software ever? I thought the GPL and other copyleft licenses made it so that the code licensed under them can never become non-free.
Edit: I understand now: dual licensing. The code distributed as GPL can/must forever be distributed as GPL code, but the copyright holder (and only the copyright holder) is free to publish it under a proprietary license. The code can never become proprietary, but the code can be used in proprietary software by the copyright holder.
well, if EVERY person who ever contributed to it agrees to a license change, the license can always change
but this is quite problematic because of two reasons:
1. you need to contact every contributor (if one died, you are out of luck)
2. all contributors need to agree (or you replace the code of the people who don't)
I think they introduced a change which allows that in GPL 3. But Audacity was under GPL 2, which is more restrictive
@@robertosswald5896 What? GPL3 came out because GPL2 wasn't restrictive enough. How is GPL2 more restrictive?
And no version of the GPL restricts what the OWNER of the code can do with his own code. If I've released something under the GPL, it's still _my code._ If I want to take my own code(no one else's) and release it proprietary later, I can. NO license can restrict what the owner does with their own code. They can only restrict what you do with someone else's code.
@@robertosswald5896 Not true, no version of GPL allows for that and never will. What made this possible is asking all contributes to either agree to the extra license, or sign ownership over to Audacity (so they could add or change licenses without asking the original author.) If any of the contributors don't agree, or just don't respond, they will have to remove the code these contributors wrote. Audacity will also need to figure out if the person that agrees to the license change is actually the same person that wrote the code. If someone later claims they wrote code and where not the person that agreed to the license change, they may have a bigger problem than needing to replace the code. Even without adding dual licensing, if the used v2 GPL does not contain the "or later" phrase, just switching from GPL v2 to v3 is almost impossible if some contributors can't be reached or verified. That the changes between v2 and v3 are only small (they are huge for on-line applications) that does not matter, you'd still need to be sure all original contributors agreed to the license change.
I might keep an eye on Tenacity if they keep the UI mostly the same. Audacity has made some tiny changes to the UI that, while otherwise are pretty insignificant, never fail to throw me. One thing I would often to is drop the sample rate down as low as I can for a simple bitcrush effect, which used to be in the bottom left corner of the main window. Now I have to constantly hunt around for where they've moved it and what they've renamed it because muscle memory is hard to override.
Also the dialog box buttons for Effects were moved from bottom to top...
That is my frustration with the Ver3.x incarnation of Audacity, the decision to hide functions you want immediate access to down in menus. Not simply from the point of view of having to chase them (you are likely to want to change a function that is across more than one sub-menu), but because the current sample rate is not displayed in view, it's easy to fail to realize you're not using the sample rate you want.
UI changes are what I was looking forward to more than anything... the program with six magnifying glasses
I updated Audacity recently and was so confused
To be fair, it's better to judge the layout for how convenient it is, not your habits. If you take a room and start adding there increasingly bigger things without moving the smaller ones, eventually you'll find yourself in a mess. But you wouldn't know it's a mess because you remember the way you built it, where each and every thing is stored.
Thank you for the summary. I left the whole mess in 2021, and was recently wondering how it all turned out. Audacity making it all in a license that prepares them for a redhat or EEE move, was good info. Thank you.
The solution for me is just to use an older version of Audacity before the aquisition. Back in early 2018 I downloaded Audacity 2.2.2 (latest at the time) from the official website, and I have been using the same exact installer since even to this day. Despite its age it does all I need an audio editor to do.
I had no idea companies could straight up buy FOSS, that terrifies me.
Well I'm pretty sure they are just buying the maintenance rights and IP of the project, but the code others right are still owned by the original others. Though musegroup made the CLA so ig that was circumnavigated a bit
They can buy the rights and then add to it
Who do they even pay? Surely they can't hunt down all the contributors and give them a cut, so I guess the maintainers just get to sell everyone else out "for free"? Some open source that is...
@@EdKolisI'm kinda curious how this works. If a single non-trivial contributor (e.g. can't revert his code) refused to sign it, does that stop things?
sounds a lot like what happened to CoolEdit by Syntrillium which then became Adobe Audition.
I think that "a complete history" would have included version numbers of when the acquisition occurred and when the other forks occurred. Without that a consumer has a difficult time knowing which version would suit them best.
In my opinion, some decisions were bad but taking with the community really helped. Tantacrul it's listening for feedback and I personally think this is making it easier for changes to be implemented in audacity
community is dead and useless, complete waste of time no one knows anything or answers anything.
It should be noted that by law in multiple countries including the EU my EU privacy law worshipers, there are laws that if software programs collect or store certain types of data then they have to make that data available if they are presented with warrant. My guess is that whatever that feature was that caused them to block users under 13 probably also made them eligible for that sort of legal requirement. And if you want to know what data I am talking about, its typically going to be cloud storage or similar.
Yeah, when you collect data about your users you have to provide it to the police if they think they need it. It's not that the company just pipes all your data to the police "just in case", but they still have to comply with warrants, and they still have to state the obvious and inform the end user that they are legally compelled to comply with warrants. The best way to avoid such issues is just not to collect data in the first place.
The same is true about the warrant in pretty much any country. Even worse, in the US under certain conditions the people doing the collecting can be put under a very strict gag order they can't even tell their employer or co-workers what they are doing.
I was just about to write this too, that's the exact reason why big borderline Spyware apps like Facebook, Instagram, etc.. are technically rated 15+.
Whether they enforce that or not, is not really that important to them
Exactly, nothing egregious here. They wanted to collect feedback, and if you do, th EU requires you to inform your users of the consequences. In eg the US, you're not required to inform the user about anything, which is even worse.
Basically, everyone panicking about their privacy was actually panicking about being well-informed, which is silly. Now that you know the side-effects, you can turn such features off.
I woudnt worry too much about the police, over here they are so horrendously underfunded they only investigate stuff like assaults, murders, arsons, ect. as well as stuff they make money from (ie all traffic offenses).
Anything else you just get a crime number and thats it.
Point of note for Windows users of Audacity and a USB interface such as the SSL2: Select WASAPI as the host option, instead of MME, for to get the input levels to operate properly, and you also get the loopback option to appear in the record selection.
Newbie here. Are you talking about recording "what you hear" without having to actually hear it on the speakers?
@@runnergo1398yes but you can still hear it
@@FlantisFroggu Is there a way to do it without having to hear it? For example, I want to record an entire album while I sleep and just set an alarm to wake up when the album is finished playing. Is it possible to somehow mute and still record?
@@runnergo1398 yeah you can just mute your pc and still record
@@FlantisFroggu How? Teach me sensei.
The stuff going on with Red Hat, and to a lesser extent Canonical, has made me lose all trust in company-driven open source projects. Sad to see Audacity become like this.
I think it's only a matter of time before Ubuntu and Audacity end up like RHEL unfortunately. Community-driven projects like Debian and Arch are the only way.
Meanwhile openSUSE doing their own little thing.
@@MyCompAndGadgetHacksJust went private by a PE firm. The reaper comes for all.
@@JollyGiant19 I mean EQT already owns 80% of SUSE plus represented on the supervisory board. I dont think any large changes will happen
Audacity owes quite a bit to the first great audio editor of the Internet era, Goldwave, that appeared as shareware back in 1993, seven years before Audacity. Of course, now Audacity is king.
I used Goldwave a lot back in 2003. I then shifted to Audacity.
Goldwave was my first decent audio editor. I used it back in the 90's. They just released the 30 year anniversay version, 6.77
I've always used Sonic Foundry's "Sound Forge 4.5" until different file formats showed up and then used Audacity.
I still use Goldwave. OK It's not 'Free', nor is it 'Open Source'. But I like Goldwave's UI much better than Audacity, and it does what I need it to do. I could never get my head around the Audacity UI after becoming used to Goldwave, and just didn't like it. Each to their own.
@@danmorgan4934 Same here. Goldwave is great.
Man this was the first audio editor i learned about when i was learning to animate
I remember my dad using it a decade ago, it's been around for a while
0:54 yeah but I think the main thing about telemetry is that people don't want to be forced to send data. Telemetry can be a good thing as it helps developers understand how thier software runs. It's why people hate Windows as even if you try to turn all telemetry options Microsoft gives you, Windows is still sending data.
Instead of turning off the network features I'd much rather just use 2.4.2 which works fine.
Still use it to this day. Use it even more now with the advent of real-time vst plugins. It's just a good interface. I use Reaper to chunk my midi stems into / create new ones, and tweak instruments and compositions, but once I've got the overall track laid down, it's just not the same as Audacity to bring the finished audio stems into and start molding envelopes and effects. It's just easier to manipulate, shortcuts make sense, and the endless options are epic, etc.
Thank you. I had no idea any of this was happening. Shocking and disturbing news to me...
Just looking at the build flags is not enough. You also need to check the code to make sure the flag has the intended effect.
Thanks for the update.
It used to be that firewalls were easy to use. It would popup something about a connection from which program and were it was intended to go. You could then clock specific individual parts and connections and still be able to use the program.
Now, we either have to be computer geniuses or BLINDLY trust your firewall. No more user friendly GUI with YOU being in control.
What operating systems could do is sandbox all software and allow you to control and even block software in it from accessing anything or communicating with anything.
Nice to know audacity has gone back on some of its poor decisions. Anyone know of a super minimal audio editor? I really only need the ability to trim and append audio clips, and of course playback the audio. Right now I just use ffmpeg from the command line but it would be nice to have simple gui interface. Might have to code one myself but too much of a soydev currently 😢.
Isnt this precisely what Audacity was made for, a open source lightweight audio editor? Give it a try anyway, don't be put off by the acquisition. Ive used it recently for a uni project and its still a good intuitive bit of software 👌
just download an old version if its that big of a deal
if you just want to trim clips you could just load the audio files in blender. but you shouldn't expect any audio effects or stuff like that. could use the free version of davinci resolve for that but I assume you care about stuff being FOSS
I honestly use ffmpeg as my convenient option.
Make a simple python or ruby web server wired to ffmpeg and make the UI with HTML canvas(I'm joking, that rabbit hole can be hell when you go in)
have they lost their minds or something? why does an audio software need telemetry or to send data to law enforcement?
Russians. That says a lot.
ALL organisations everywhere send data to law enforcement when required. Otherwise they would not be allowed to operate in that jurisdiction. The fact that Audacity specifically warns of this is a GOOD THING, not a reason for criticism.
@@plrndl There is a difference between "when required by law" and "when asked" or "when demanded". And as far as I know, the "when required by law" doesn't need to be in a policy, since the user is already required to know the law. The wording in the policy is usually much broader than just when legally required and only the type of data that is legally required to be send.
Um, because it's boiler plate legalese that inherently comes with a proposed change and never made it past discussion. Then a few linux publications, who need to thrive on controversy to get clicks, took that and ran with it. At no point was that Muse Group's actual policy.
@@joshuapettus6973 I'm sure they had a chance to check their privacy policy by now. It still contains "requests from law enforcement or other governmental entities;" which is still way beyond what is required by law. They could have shortened their privacy policy to "you agree that you don't have any." It's not boilerplate, many companies don't sign away the rights of their users that easily. Standard is "when required by law" not "when requested by law". Most companies also don´t require you to agree to browser cookies when you visit their privacy policy page, so you could read it before deciding if you want to read the rest of the website and agree to cookies. They don't seem to have any intention of playing fair.
Slow burning question that has been banging around in my brain stem, thanks for the video.
I am a total amateur/novice to Audacity. I only use it to normalize my recording and/or to separate tracks, with a few times to grab streaming recordings. I have been quite content using "Dark Audacity" and to date I have had no motivation for new/different additions of Audacity. Your post has been reassuring to me.
what would you think about syncthing's take on telemetry, it pretty much shows you json payload and says -this is data we want to collect, do you agree?-
I usually click all checkboxes to disable telemetry in all of my apps but syncthing got me with that kind of transparency and stuff they collect didnt seem too overreaching
That's how it should be done. One of the big things about telemetry is that it can be very useful for developers to make a better product, it can also be used for other things that are less acceptable.
I actually only just started using Audacity on a side project I decided to do, and I felt right at home- the interface and options are a lot like the audio apps I used on Macs decades ago
Thanks for this roundup of information!
Glad I found this video. I've been wondering about all of this. Thanks.
Thank you. Audacity got a reputation in my head for "Audacity bad, don't use it" that has not been updated in years. Good to know I can update that reputation and use Audacity again.
Audacity's feel and interface felt too clunky and limited. Paying $60 only once for Reaper sped up my editing skills and made me much more agile in learning production so I don't miss Audacity because that $60 paid itself in the time I saved over the past few years
Yeah, given the one-time reasonable cost of REAPER I can’t imagine using anything else.
This was immensely helpful. Thanks, Eric! 🙂 You also gave enough information so that users with a different usage profile can reach their own conclusion which may differ, in their case.
Thank you so much for making us aware we really appreciate it.
It will take years, if at all, to regain trust by it's users after Audacity unleashed all these changes and controls on it's software.
Regain trust? Don't be daft. They're on the path to closing it now.
its* 2 times
I doubt that, I'm pretty confident in saying most of its users didn't know there was an issue or would have cared if they did. Only a very vocal group of linux users (i.e. a percentage point of a percentage point) made noise and most of them don't even know the real details of the issue. So no, trust was not lost.
On the one hand, yeah, I agree that they shouldn't have changed so much. On the other hand, they're *legally required* to send data to law enforcement if requested and as such that privacy policy change is not exactly their fault. They shouldn't have removed that because now if someone uses audacity to commit a crime somehow, the company themselves will be liable as well. And again, legally they have to put that "nobody under 13" thing as well, though they're allowed to have exceptions for education purposes and such. The only valid criticism so far is sending telemetry data to google and yandex. Even adding telemetry in and of itself is reasonable for crash reporting purposes and update checks. And that was walked back and can be opted out of, so it's fine. Honestly anyone who complained about this comes across, to me, as a whiny brat who doesnt like change and doesn't understand what FOSS is actually about or how laws work.
Granted my own understanding is based on US law, may be different elsewhere.
The complainers got the decision to use Google and Yandex reversed tho
100%, it was all a big nothing burger. The only thing I'm glad they removed is the yandex analytics, I dont mind google analytics if it can be disabled
privacy advocates have done a lot of good but they also have the tendency to be a tad hysterical
How would someone use Audacity to commit a crime? I suppose it's possible but I can't imagine how.
@@billfarley9015 they can't, but police will try to get as much information about a person
Thanks for the overview. Nice work.
Thank you young man. This old guitar hack used it alot. So informative!
why did they remove "Project rate" from the bottom section of the app?
it was useful for quickly changing the sample rate, now you have to go to the preferences menu and change it there
Why would you even change the sample rate in an already-existing project? Why not just leave it at a certain rate in the first place?
The _audacity_ of Audacity.
**FRAUDACITY!!**
Thanks for making this! When you brought up just choosing not to send crash reports when prompted, I immediately thought of when Windows 10 came out and people ran it through a network monitor and found that disabling and turning off telemetry and bug reports didn’t really do everything it should have.
So, two questions:
• Has anyone run it through a network monitor to see if it actually doesn’t send telemetry when you choose to not send a crash report, or at all when it’s compelled with flags disabling it?
• Has anyone reviewed all of the source code looking for things that might not be affected (intentionally or unintentionally) by the flags?
how does a company "acquire" something that is "open source"? please explain.
I remember the drama, and my takeaway was that if they think they need telemetry to identify what Audacity needs to improve, then they didn't deserve to helm the project anyway. So much of what Audacity needs is painfully obvious. It's clear to me the new owners were ramping up to selling that data to advertisers and probably throwing targeted ads into your clients, so its a good thing users got them to back down. I really want to tell every FOSS project to look closely at what the blender foundation has achieved and emulate that vehemently. Non-destructive effects is a great step forward though. Nice update video on a topic I haven't looked into lately.
Blender is a very unique case I'm not sure thats really viable for most other FOSS software, but I'd like to get your thoughts on how Audacity or other FOSS projects might be able to do what Blender does in this regard because I cant really think of how.
@@LiPolygon granted not all projects can, but at least ones in the same lane (content creation apps) could follow very closely if they have the will to synthesize how the blender foundation works and their strategy. Ardour is in a better position than Audacity in this regard, but corporate sponsorship should be a cornerstone of the financial plan. Fostering a big user community through outreach is another important plank to galvanize and expand that feedback loop. Lastly, it is important to figure out governance ie who is able to decide long term vision, goal, focuses, updates, etc
I think companies now rely on telemetry instead of actually asking users, focus groups, etc.
This video has been sitting at the top of my UA-cam recommendations for a week now, and I have no idea why. Here, I yield, take my view and like.
Thanks for this review/update. I've been wondering about Audacity. I've used it on and off and was switching to "on" again when the drama was coming to a head. I looked for any of the other forks but found what you have. Happy to know that it's still the best choice.
As a Windows user I indeed couldn't care less about the licenses or telemetry. What made Audacity dead for me is the lack of things that Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition) had back in Windows98 times. Basic spectrum view, repair brush... I want to see the sound and change it with my hands, not just drop a few effects and *hope* they will do the job.
you are comparing a free editor with a commercial package from a multibillion dollar company that probably costs more than the computer you are using it on....
No @@Debbiebabe69 I am comparing it to a 20-year old app that cost $69. Today you can get Audition 2020 key for $50. Subscription for latest costs 250-300/year. Not even saying that you don't _have to_ pay for it.
@@Debbiebabe69 You can easily pirate old Adobe software. Like, you know you've hit rock bottom when you're using Audacity
Comparing to Audacity, is CoolEdit Pro ,100000x better, so many options and also multitrack
i loved CoolEdit!
I like the older versions better. There was a really cool build in process called "Leveller" in some of the older builds and it disappeared. Also VyNil. I doubt I'll really use any of the non-destructive features. If I'm doing that kind of audio production I generally want something proper like Cubase. Audacity is good for radio production though and I pretty much always use it for that. It does pretty well for tracking audio productions in the field, but better to export out the tracks, again to something a bit fuller. They never seemed to have solved that issue of when you record directly into Audacity there is that annoying pre-roll section of the file that seems to always exist. Old versions do it, new one does and even Dark Audacity does it too.
The Leveller was moved into the Distortion effect category some time ago. Possibly an early hint that Audacity was wandering away from just being a good, easy to use audio editor.
1:11 "I don't want my audio editing software to send my data to law enforcement"
I don't know why but this really made me laugh lmao
now that is a good summary, thank you!
Thanks for the update. For Linux Mint, the stable version of Audacity is 2.4.2 which is kind of ancient. Is that new enough? Also another alternative app is Audacious, about which I know nothing.
I don't think a lot of these are "decisions", they're legal requirements. US and international law requires companies to reveal data when legally requested by authorities, for example.
They can opt to not collect data in the first place.
I wondered why all of the sudden my audio project was so extremely laggy when I updated. Probably constantly failed the telemetry connection over and over again eating up resources.
This was a very helpful video. Thank you!
I never knew about the acquisition. I got scared, then found out all the issues I was worried about were reversed 😅
I feel like the Squidward meme for this is misleading and works counter to the message of the video.
Tenacity is a fork of Audacity that doesn't have the problems associated with the original program.
I don't see the "problems" as problems for my use so I'm sticking with Audacity.
I don't understand how that company could buy an open source project. But the open source license should prevent all the hazzle with that company. Just fork and let that company rot in hell!
It's been already done.
I'd rather just use Audacity 2.4.2 which works perfectly fine.
Fair enough. I think the corporate takeover has turned off a lot of people.
I had no idea Audacity hasn't had non-destructive editing for such a long time.
Good to hear that they've implemented it now. I'd say it's a mandatory feature for professional work.
I am still using a 2015 version, and was blissfully unaware of all this. IIRC, the version has never prompted for an update. It does more than I want, otherwise, I would perhaps have looked for an update.
What's the last version of Audacity that is recommended. I'm running 2.4.0. Which version should I try to update to, to avoid all these issues?
Would be interesting to see if installing via a Windows package manager (e.g. chocolatey) confers the same benefits as Linux equivalents. Anyway, my Audacity installs are all old and working fine.
Dear Open SOurce Devs. PLEASE MAKE IT EASY TO DONATE!
And it would be SO COOL if you would add something like Custom Not FREE software into the program to show that making a donation for the Normies Means something.
I am to the point I don't even use free software if I can't donate to the project. Even on the App Store, I always go for the PRO version. Why? Morals.
When I was a POOR Sailor? And after my divorce? All these Free programs allowed me to learn the software so that I could Move up in life. And I pay that back by donating just as if I just Bought the program on sale on Steam etc.
Audacity is FANTASTIC! I have not used it in YEARS (Thanks Portland!) But I really loved what I could do with it.
how did portland stop you from using audacity? also, if features were paywalled, it wouldn't be a donation, nor would it be FOSS.
@@adog3129 Lets talk about the Paywall first:
Operation of the software would not be limited. What DOES make people want to Donate to the software is to add things like plugin support. Custom Backgrounds, Memory Features, GPU / CPU Acceleration of Audio processing via 3rd Party tools, Custom modified Kernal optimization per platform? Etc.
These would not stop the core functionality of the software package.
Just like Windows is easy to install vs Linux where it could take a Feature like Windows Update to automatically update the software.
These are USER Convenience items. Not core software functions.
Branding is another thing that would help.
Say you buy a Phone or Camera or Mic that has some issues in the Frequency response, or an up and coming Wireless mic.
You could then say that if you buy the microphone from "X" online store, it comes with the plugins and config with the software ready to go with a custom control panel built in.
The Purchase includes a donation built into it.
Maybe you want a Custom Skin?
Making these a downloadable upgrade for $1.00 would be a Fast and Easy way to upgrade the look and feel of the software if they don't want to custom mod the files structure itself.
Its just small things that normal people would be happy to pay for out of convenience.
A Daily A.I. generated Video of the people who have donated to the Project should be done on the weekly.
With one person getting a Custom Build named after them. (The A-dog Build for example)
This would all be almost nil for time or resource to do and would bring in much needed funding for cool projects like this.
ABOUT MY COMPUTER
My FORMER probation officer took my Laptop. And My hardware I used for work. Then told me they were "Still doing an Investigation"- DA said that was Bullshit. Judge as well and ordered I get my laptop and my hardware back.
THE Multnomah country Probation office REFUSED to give me back my Hardware!
And still have it to this very day. Why?
It shows they Tampered with Evidence.
WHO? :
ROn Ramsey: Probation Officer for Family COurt Multnomah county.
Aurora Pina: Probation Officer for Family Court Multnomah county.
A Guy named " John" that withheld his last name and Business card. Lied about being the head of the office.
They got my password to my laptop from my ex to say I contacted her to say I broke a No contact Order.
Well, that was when the problem occured.
I do Data Forensincs. They also broke the Chain of CUSTODY.
Once i got the Laptop Back?
It would go to someone like Rossman or others to show that the machines file structure has been altered.
The Bios would also show a Power on in the FIrmware.
This is also shown on the Google's own Servers for a login attempt done while I was IN CUSTODY.
So this is why they don't want to give me back my machine or my computer bag.
In fact i had to Call the VA to get them to give me back my Eyeglasses & Blood sugar meter.
They also happned to make a copy of all my customers and clients data.
I was working for Qually at the time in California. (the top security firm for Government)
The Made a COPY of all the data on the laptop Without a Warrant to do so.
In fact? They did much more then that.
What I can tell you is that if you are an Oregonian? You have free credit reports for life due to what they did and let out in the wild.
Look up the Bank of America Data Breach in 2019.
PWOOFS?
www.portlandoregon.gov/bts/article/754389
Much more as well.
What I can tell you?
This caused much more than just 2 million in damages.
It goes FAR deeper than that.
Portland Police & Probation were involved in a Data Breach that was used to pilfer funds from private citizens.
Even going as far as using their "Privileges" to look up people to date seeing how much money they had in their Bank accounts.
There was one judge that had a open Bench warrant "Format" anyone could use in order to send the document via fax, and collect their information.
PARTIAL SOURCE :
www.ijpr.org/law-and-justice/2021-10-17/data-breach-shows-dozens-of-oregon-law-enforcement-officers-affiliated-with-far-right-militia
This is similar to what was going on in California where Officers were using Tinder profiles to see in their database if they would be a good date.
NOT KIDDING!.
They would get full access to their Social media accounts that were private to anyone else.
This includes pictures of their children, family members, Events, emails and messages.
An Anon caught on to what was going on and then laid the trap:
account.sacbee.com/paywall/subscriber-only?resume=231444528&intcid=ab_archive
And man, there is so SOO much more.
Currently they're porting the new UI from MuseScore 4 to Audacity. That took an incredibly long time to do since it was basically rewriting almost everything + all the other improvments like the new synth etc.
By coincidence due to not working with audio for a long time I stopped using audacity right around the time all the drama started. I had planned to use my old version forever and not update it but now that I see that things have improved I'll use a newer version and opt out of the telemetry options, so thanks for that.
I wanna be forgotten
And I don't wanna be reminded
You say, "Please don't make this harder"
No, I won't yet
I wanna be beside her
She wanna be admired
You say, "Please don't make this harder"
No, I won't yet
Oh, dear, is it really all true?
Did they offend us and they want it to sound new?
Top ten ideas for countdown shows
Whose culture is this and does anybody know?
I wait and tell myself, "Life ain't chess"
But no one comes in and yes, you're alone
You don't miss me, I know
Oh, Tennessee, what did you write?
I come together in the middle of the night
Oh, that's an ending that I can't write
'Cause I've got you to let me down
I wanna be forgotten
And I don't want to be reminded
You say, "Please don't make this harder"
No, I won't yet
I wanna be beside her
She wanna be admired
I said, "Please don't make this harder"
No, I won't yet
???
The problem is that too many people consume FOSS as "free as in beer". It's really supposed to be a two-way street - you contribute with a financial donation, or you can also contribute to the project itself by submitting tweaks and changes into the codebase.
It's not meant to be a free-for-all where people just take take take.
Well 99.9% of the population dont have the know-how, but yes. If you have technical expertise, you should, from time to time, contribute to free software if you believe in thr movement
ac
Good information. Thanks for the vid.
I didn't even know Audacity had been acquired. That's sad.
I wonder why developers didn’t switch over to other projects? Seems if there was outrage they would support other forks
They did for a while, but most of them have died off. Hopefully more developers can get behind Tenacity and make it even better.
@@EricMurphyxyzdo u have any tips regarding how should I configure my anti-virus while installing & using pirated software?
It’s for the same reason people don’t pay for or contribute to open source, the primary pitch is it’s free to them; no need to exchange their time or money.
@@EricMurphyxyz why does it take. Time for adobe open source alternatives to catch upto adobe's features, sure are already some software but such as After effects which still has no open source derivative that can directly compete to it.
@@jirehla-ab1671tbh, you can't really do much about that. Antiviruses don't have a database of every random cryptominer from every cracked version, why? Short version: not profitable and time consuming. In case of Adobe, they pay companies to do that stuff.
Just use virtual machine and basic antivirus settings and download only from trusted repacks tbh.
Happy to br first person to comment and like
I'll update the comment with my thoughts after finishing the video
UPDATE: the right thing to do right now is forking it basically and remove these things
Also keeping the repo updated by that I mean if audacity dropped a new feature we will add to *our* free audacity
wow
That's what happened before but nobody could keep the forks running for long enough to make it happen. I would prefer if there was a fork like that to be honest but at the moment none exists
@@EricMurphyxyz yesh it's pretty hard to do that unfortunately 😔
as a casual user I had no idea, what a bummer.
Free and open-source software doesn't get "acquired" by companies. As long as it's an asset, it's not free and open-source.
i'd rather not use audacity anymore regardless
Fair enough
I have an old version of Audacity and it's great. I used it to record myself using a UA-cam karaoke version of Come Monday (by Jimmy Buffet) and it sounds really good. Of course, as always, I endeavored to match Jimmy Buffet in every inflection. There's nothing worse than a cover that completely ignores (and trashes) the original.
What version do you use?
@@DrkTrx - I did a Help->About and this is what it says: "Audacity 2.3.2"
I have an earlier installer version on my network: 2.1.2.
I downloaded that one in January 2016
Didn't know about the drama, just started seeing useful changes, like VST support and update notifications (although I hate the update check on startup pattern, incredibly distracting). And it's needed that effects thing, I hope they expand that to get it to work with the existing plugins, or VST plugins.
You didn't tell me something new, but it was a good summary. I still like audacity, but haven't look on other forks. Now I know, they aren't better. And the company still listen to the user. This may change. Thank you!
Ocenaudio has all the editing capabilities of Audacity but wrapped in a much more streamlined, modern and intuitive interface. It's not open-source, but it's free, doesn't have ads, is also cross-platform and runs fast at native speed.
Isn't Ocean Audio full of ad trackers and such?
@@crysstoll1191 not sure... but to be safe I'll drop the executables into IDA to double check.
Thanks..
One thing I'll say is UA-camr/musician/design genius Tantacrul joined the Audacity team somewhat recently and idk if he's still there but he was super hyped about improving it, and it seemed like he was helping to make practical and awesome updates!
Is there a video that you can go over using this to transfer some of my vinyl collection to 320 mp3?
How do you use an audio-only editor for cleaning up the audio part of a file that also has video?
I use Audacity and I like it (I use Linux). If they're only using telemetry to keep track of the types of machines people are using and what they use the software for, I'm okay with that. It's when they try to collect personal information so that they can track me personally and target ads at me is when I object.
The irony that you don't trust google yet the video is posted on UA-cam. None of the data being sent to whoever is illegal. Where it turns nasty is when the data is used by a company to target a user with something to sell especially if your a younger user
I LOVE AUDACITY. Thank you for your hard work on this video Eric Murphy!!! I wish I knew stuff like build and how to get to it. But I don't.
Per the Privacy Policy updates - I do a lot of various Terms of Service work with my professional life. These are all just very, very standard clauses the original author clearly didn't know he had to comply with when releasing the original software. For instance, the over-13 requirement is part of COPPA laws in the United States. It's a requirement if you service the USA whether it's in your policy or not.
My first company was a blogging platform, and we had a lot of under-13s. When it first started, I literally was emailing/calling parents for approval to comply with this law. So that said - all other things aside - the updates to the privacy policy are more "coming into compliance" than signals of maliciousness.
Thing is, audacity is licensed under the GPL, which is not a permissive license, so for a company to "acquire" it means nothing, maybe acquire the trademark? Buthe besides that, they have to keep licensing the code under the GPL, or they have to rewrite all of the codebase from before the acquisition, meaning, it's nonsensical. You can always fork their builds and modify the code to remove all of the anti-features. So for a company to acquire a foss project's trademark doesn't make much sense unless they plan to sell support for it, which I don't see how for an audio editing software.
Unfortunately not, that's why the CLA is so important. If they really not only require any new contributor to sign a CLA but also any past contributor and they indeed revert any past contribution from anyone who does not sign the CLA, they can then relicense the project to anything they wish. Of course, the last version published under GPL would still be GPL and anyone could start a fork from it but they could go on under any other license, including closed source.
This is why I decided not to contribute to any project that would require me to sign a CLA (which, BtW, includes e.g. glibc so it's not just "those bad companies" who uses this questionable practice).
Is Audacity bit-perfect? This means samples aren't altered unless they need to be. Editing operations should not cause unnecessary cumulative loss of the audio data upon each edit or loose data integrity simply because the file got re-encoded upon saving. Bit-perfect also means editing a portion of an audio file should only affect that portion leaving the rest of the file untouched. Every unedited byte should be identical, or "bit-perfect", to the original master file. If not, no thanks; I will keep using WaveShop instead; it's bit-perfect. What I put in is exactly what I get out of it except for the edits.
As far as I know it is bit-perfect, I don't see why it would not. As long as you don't change the sample rate, bit depth, etc. and you use lossless formats. An audacity project is a sqlite3 database with uncompressed samples. I've opened a WAV file, reversed, saved, closed, and repeated the same operation again, and I got an identical WAV file back. The first file was saved with audacity too, so if there's any difference with other WAV files it will only be the metadata, not the actual audio data. Audacity also can import and export raw audio data in many formats.
@DiThi Yes that is what I was aiming for. As long as parts of the file I don't edit are not altered, I"m fine with that. There is also something called dither, which I do not understand. I've read it's important to keep it from being altered in master recordings, but I don't know why. Someone please explain that one to me.
@@stephen.jenkins.gospel Dithering is noise added to an image when downsampling to a few number of colors, to simulate the missing detail and avoid banding. It's how old computers and pixel art are able to show a lot of detail and gradients with a very small palette. I imagine that in audio something similar is done when changing the bit depth or the sample rate, random noise is more pleasant than artifacts of digital quantization. But if you're not changing the sample rate or bit depth, it makes no sense to alter the samples.
Why the blazes can't these damn companies keep their mucky fingers out of anything that works well already? They're a blasted nuisance.
Switched to a fork of Audacity when that all went down, never looked back.
Which fork?
@@EricMurphyxyz Probably Tenacity since that's what the majority went to.
Thanks for researching this and presenting this to us. We should all know about these issues. Good work.
I do animation, and Audacity is excellent for making sound effects and adapting noises. And I bet the bit about "law enforcement" was probably referring to pirated music. Maybe. Who knows?
I always have a laugh when Americans call China for spying 😂😂
When every app and software in the US is spying on everyone CRAZY
Yeah, but the motives are completely different. US spies for intelligence. China spies to copy products.
Are the non-destructive effects still able to run Nyquist scripts? If so, thats super powerful!
Was banning the software from under 13s legally valid at any point? Based on a quick search the license Audacity uses is GPL-2.0 (or later) which explicitly says "The act of running the Program is not restricted" which seems to clearly contradict any such age restrictions and I don't think the GPL licenses allow changing the license terms to be more restrictive.