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Audacity 4.0 is finally out! (www.audacityteam.org)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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TL;DR this is a huge overhaul of the popular open-source audio editing app. The UI specifically has been the biggest overhaul, making it a lot more modern and friendly to use.

Hopefully, one day, GIMP will get some kind of update like this.

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[–] 71 points 2 months ago (24 children)

Is audacity still bad and sending information to Russian servers or something?

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  • [–] 47 points 2 months ago (18 children)

    Surprisingly, the Internet seems to look mostly favourably on Audacity these days. I never really kept up with it at the time, but apparently all the allegedly heinous (mis)features were opt-in. (Further verification of this may be required.)

    I can't tell if that's the result of a really good scrubbing of bad search results or whether they genuinely cleaned up their act.

    Either way, Tenacity, the fork that came about as a result of the controversy, still exists, and apparently has themes to change the look just like Audacity is claiming to have done now, so if you're uncertain, that's always an option.

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  • [–] 42 points 2 months ago (11 children)

    I got tired of Tenacity staying stagnant for months, and still having documentation link issues. Meanwhile, Audacity was actually making meaningful improvements.

    After diving deeper in the nontroversy, and seeing their in-depth video explaining their design decisions, I concluded that they genuinely want to improve the software and aren't trying to fuck over the OSS community. So, I switched back when I dumped Windows and switched to Linux.

    There's an extreme black and white view of these kinds of issues that crop up in the community that just pisses me off, and shoddy tech reporting doesn't help matters. This wasn't a "Oracle buys MySQL" situation, and the response didn't deserve a fork. But, hey, it's free software, and people can fork whatever they want.

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  • [–] 37 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    It wasn't about "shoddy tech reporting". Why would a FOSS audio editing app need to know your country, any personal "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)", share it with a wide network of people and potential buyers, as well as their "main office in Russia"? There should be no telemetry of any sort. Any logs kept should be strictly local, which would allow users to send them to the support team voluntarily.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    It was to support the auto-update mechanism IIRC. It has to reach out to a server to do that, and the rest of the terms are just legal CYA for what could be possible based on that.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I don't see how an auto-update feature would need any of those things either. The request is made by the remote user to the Audacity update server. Of course, Linux servers typically keep logs, but that would be one line saying that in order for the app to check for updates or to be updated, an IP address and connection timestamp may end up on the update server.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    You really don't realize that your ip address can tell them which country you're in? So that they're obligated to disclose in the terms that they have this info, and that if for some reason police ever come knocking, police would also get this info. Takes all of a minute to think about this.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago

    Also your city and ISP, but that information isn't mentioned, so it's evident it wasn't to catch all. Nothing in the way it's worded is consistent with your rationale, and the actual policy is significantly more broad. They're not specifying the information shared with law enforcement would be limited to the IP address or data that can be gathered from it. It's a completely separate row.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (5 children)

    Why would I want an auto-update mechanism in the software? That's what my distro's package manager is for. And it doesn't care who I am or where I'm from. Nor has any other software I've encountered with such a useless-to-Linux-users mechanism demanded any information about me.

    In short, that rationale is obvious nonsense. That may be why they claim they're doing it, but it doesn't hold up.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Indeed, all software maintainers should make their legal decisions on the fact of which OS nyan@lemmy.cafe uses.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah it's a pretty wild mix of paranoia and technical ignorance from both Nyan and Rose here, hey?

    If you're that paranoid and that ideologically "pure", compile it your fucking self. They made it trivial to remove.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I apologize for phrasing things so poorly that several people seem to have missed my actual point, which was: no one else with an auto-update feature requires any information about you, therefore if they claim that's their reason for asking for users' personal information, they're lying. They may have other reasons, which they have not stated. They may even be good reasons, although I'm not holding my breath.

    And yes, I have compiled my own copy with that nonsense switched off, thanks for asking. However, it's the job of people who understand that this is overreach to push back against it on behalf of the people who lack the knowledge, time, or energy to investigate it. I don't like throwing even Windows users under the bus.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Nobody misunderstands you. You're just wrong. An auto-update system, by definition, requires you send a request to their server. That gives them access to your IP address, which potentially gives them information including your location.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    I remember when audacity was pure destructive editing, the mspaint of daws, like not quite notepad and sound recorder, but maybe wordpad. I think I still have a version of that old audacity installer somewhere....

    I always kept/keep a full licensed daw for real projects, and then audacity for when I wanted to do a quick edit or recording and didn't want to boot up the big stuff.

    Is it worth getting anymore? Or is it trying to compete with real daws? And if so, is it competitive on the same level?

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Audacity isn't a fully fledged DAW, it's an audio editor that's mostly for recording, making quick edits, or fixing up audio. I don't think it's really possible to use it in music production yet.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Is it worth getting?

    Maybe someone else will have a better answer. I used it once in a blue moon to naively hack at some audio, and will install it or Tenacity to do the same in future as and when the need arises. In fact, I'll probably end up going for Audacity and a wary eye for telemetry opt-ins because Debian seems to have a native package for it. Tenacity seems to be Flatpak-only.

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  • [–] 89 points 2 months ago (2 children)
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