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Audacity 3.4
- evgpbfhnr 3y agoSpeaking of which, how did that "audacity isn't FOSS" fuss end up? A quick search shows tenacity is still active ( https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity ) but I have no idea how much the projects kept interacting after the initial debate
- RockRobotRock 3y agoseems like its because they tried to add basic telemetry?
- KMnO4 3y agoYes, they updated their privacy and data collection policy. That’s kinda the blessing and the curse of FOSS. You absolutely can fork the repo, remove the telemetry, and republish it as a new app. But fragmentation is confusing, requires a lot of maintenance, and really I’m not sure it was worth it. Those who are particularly conscious about the telemetry can block it with a single line in /etc/hosts.
- swyx 3y agoseriously, people who get outraged over telemetry should temper their anger. most of the time the telemetry isn't used to sell your data or something nefarious (its quite useless if you dont even have a login, like audacity does), its just being used to try to improve the product for you. i write this as someone who's been involved in one too many debates about the perils of introducing telemetry to a commercial open source thing because "HN would tear us apart"
- mehlmao 3y agoThe developers who acquired Audacity had previously threatened to have someone deported to China and tortured over their API. https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/muse_group_deportation_threat/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/muse_group_deportatio...
- averageRoyalty 3y agoI did some basic digging and this is at best a misrepresentation[1]. The original email appears to indicate they intended to contact CCP authorities. The inference I took is that they believed the developer was in China. Later they stated that violation of law in Canada could result in revocation of visa. So "threated to have someone deported" is maybe a stretch, "tortuted" is pretty untrue. The github issue appears to show a pretty reasonable attempt by both parties to move forward. 1. https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issuecomment-882450335 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mehlmao 3y agoMusegroup's head of strategy posted the following and removed it later after backlash: "If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country. This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his – 'Fuck 学习强国', which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received." Hard to take that as anything but a threat. My point stands that Musegroup has proven that they should not be trusted with any information about users.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoThe problem is you never know what they will share. Today, they just want to track which buttons get clicked. Tomorrow, maybe some eager PM wants to upload all of my environment variables. If it can fully run locally on my machine, I do not want it sending anything external. Lastly, as an abused Firefox user, it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like.
- djur 3y agoThe problem with this argument is that there's no reason to believe a slippery slope exists. It's just as easy to go from "no tracking" to "digital colonoscopy" as it is when your starting point is "anonymized crash reporting". Any new release of any software could start spying on you.
- saintmatthieu 3y ago> it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like If the removed features are only features you like, then they probably aren't doing things right... The one most relevant purpose for telemetry I see for Audacity is precisely preventing this from happening, meanwhile fostering a more vigorous growth of the repo by cutting off dead branches. Audacity is over 20 years of development of features, some of which we every now and again wonder if they're still used. Not knowing, we try our best maintaining these, which slows down Development, QA and Design in delivering features that are relevant now.
- sneak 3y agoIt’s a consent violation. That always warrants anger. The purpose for violating consent is irrelevant. Using a user’s computer to spy on them when they don’t want it to is extremely rude, in all cases, even if the surveillance data is thrown away and never used. Developers who implement such features should be named and highlighted and should have trouble finding new jobs. It’s shady and unethical to make such software, doing so should be a black mark on one’s professional record, just like stealing. It is literally malware. Your assumption that violating consent is ok as long as it isn’t “nefarious” is the problem.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- saint_yossarian 3y agoLooks like there's also a build flag to disable all networking, which the Debian package sets: https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/audacity/-/commit/1dd028e24330d9e541ba0f9fa51f474c5407ae21 https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/audacity/-/commit/1...
- bscphil 3y agoAs does Arch Linux: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/audacity/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/au... Distributions and open source maintainers looking out for their users, once again.
- radarsat1 3y agoSure, but it's not even enabled by default in the upstream repository. Maybe that's a result of all the fuss about it, but nonetheless.. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/6c2e8a2377542d67226b03c40333b14ae1c1b3ee/CMakeLists.txt#L225 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/6c2e8a2377542d6722...
- djur 3y agoThe primary network activity Audacity does is checking for updates, which you don't want in a distro-packaged binary in any case. I don't know if it's "looking out for users".
- actionfromafar 3y agoAnd marking it PG-13 :-D
- nemetroid 3y agoThe reason for the "non-FOSS" accusations was not related to the introduction of telemetry, but the new CLA. But they did this around the same time they tried to add (but backed out) telemetry, so people tend to confuse the two events. Which I guess is helpful for Muse. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932
- Conscat 3y agoTenacity is distinct in more fundamental ways that just not being copyright infringement (for one, it uses a different GUI toolkit and is way slower and buggier), so its appeal at this point isn't closely related to whether people like Muse or not.
- actionfromafar 3y agoWould be nice with a fork which followed Audacity closely but without the telemetry. (Like VS Codium I suppose.)
- Eduard 3y agoAuditorium :)
- LWinterberg 3y agoThis fork exists and it's called Audacity. Audacity doesn't have any telemetry, the PR never got merged. And any online functionality it does have (automatic update checking, crash reporting) can be turned off.
- nyanpasu64 3y agoPerhaps remove the "Share Audio" ~~ad~~ button in the toolbar?
- LWinterberg 3y agoFeel free to! View > Toolbars > Share Audio toolbar disables it. Compiling from source has it disabled by default.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoI recently needed to do some sound editing, and I had a dreadful experience with Tenacity. Running on PopOS, I encountered many crashes doing simple manipulations. Even trying to scroll while playing audio ostensibly resulted in a crash. Small favor, the restore-unsaved-work functionality did save me several times. Eventually, I held my nose and ran Audacity in a VM, and not a single crash.
- nine_k 3y agoRunning in a VM is drastic. I'd go for bubblewrap, or a plain container. Can cut network access all right.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoIndeed, there are other options, but a VM is the only one in which I feel safe that I do not screw up the configuration somehow. Docker can punch through a firewall, what other “obvious” settings exist in whatever lockdown option I pick? Barring a VM escape exploit, I know that my private data is not getting exposed.
- Intralexical 3y agoArdour's pro-grade, isn't it? Maybe not as easy to start with as Audacity, but surely easier and more useful to set up than Audacity in a VM.
- djur 3y agoIf you don't trust Audacity, why would you trust Ardour?
- djur 3y agoWhy would you run Audacity in a VM?
- Arnavion 3y agoFWIW it was never an issue for Linux distribution packages of Audacity. It was behind a compile-time flag so distro build scripts could have been changed to disable the telemetry. In fact the flag was disabled by default, so distro build scripts didn't even need to change and would've continued producing telemetry-free binaries. Only binaries from Audacity themselves had the telemetry, which (as usual) is why you should never use upstream binaries.
- LWinterberg 3y agoIt's complete BS. Audacity never stopped being open source and currently has update checking and crash reporting - it does not have any telemetry.
- didntcheck 3y agoAnd telemetry isn't even a bad thing. Firefox has had more extensive telemetry than Audacity for years. This idea that it's evil and nefarious to collect voluntary statistics on program usage to better target (limited) development resources is quite eye-rolling
- mlry 3y agoHow about calling it evil and nefarious to speak about voluntary statistics when it is not opt-in, but opt-out? There are users out there who will agree to anything. But I doubt those are the ones that really should direct the evolution of a piece of software. And almost no users will agree to telemetry when openly asked what we are talking about. And I have yet to be convinced that telemetry is actually as useful as proclaimed. I don't really see Firefox moving in a direction that enhances user experience based on gathered data. Windows, anyone?
- LWinterberg 3y agoIn the context of Audacity, telemetry already would have been useful: A previous version removed the cut/copy/paste buttons, thinking that people normally used ctrl+x/c/v. However, in practice this turned out to only be half-true: while cutting in the context of cut-and-paste may have been used with shortcuts, a fairly significant number of Audacity users actually used "the scissors" to cut (as in: delete) content and came to the forum to complain because their core workflow was broken. This sort of situation is bad for everyone: People get their workflow broken, devs need to do work to remove and later reinstate a feature, and privacy-minded people who want to complain need to share name and email to sign up on a forum for an account. In addition, it is hard to gauge what significance the forum posts have: If 100 people are complaining, are they a vocal minority of the millions of users Audacity has, or are they representative of most people? This is especially true considering Audacity is the sort of casual "useful toolbox USB stick" program for many people - they're not going to closely follow development and updates or participate in polls or surveys, simply because it's not a part of their life they care about that much. This situation is different for something like Blender in which the tool tends to be a major part of your hobby or job if you use it at all. Although, saying that: This is a hypothesis based on my perception which cannot be verified as neither Blender nor Audacity track this data. With telemetry (which for Audacity would have been a "do you want telemetry yes/no"-type dialog on first launch) the question "does anyone actually use the cut/copy/paste buttons?" would have been answered with "actually, yes", things would have been done differently, nobody's workflows would have been broken, and privacy-minded folks would not have needed to put emails on a forum which may or may not get hacked in the future. In some sense, even people who disable telemetry benefit from telemetry being an option - assuming that their needs are in aggregate otherwise similar to the average user.
- FigurativeVoid 3y agoThese are some really nice quality of life updates. I've never used time stretching, but combined with the beats and measure markers, it could be really nice.
- SoftTalker 3y agoYeah I don’t use this application much but I have occasionally created edits, condensed a song by shortening the intro or dropping a verse, and having beat alignment would be convenient
- defrost 3y agoThere's a particular occasional need for easy to use time stretching of audio against video. Every now and again there'll be a hard to otherwise source episode of something that turns up two poor vesions, one with good video but damaged | lower quality sound another with good sound | bad video .. and they each have differing frame rates and edit cuts. To make a better version involves a bit of time stretching on the audio between marks. I still have an eye out for the best OS tool for merging and aligning video + audio + subtitles tracks .. the smoothly integrated intersection of MKVToolNix + SubtitleEdit + Audacity.
- actionfromafar 3y agoVideo copied from analog sources also often suffers from video and audio out of sync. (Due to a bunch of factors such as dropped frames etc.)
- qingcharles 3y agoSounds like you are doing God's work. Keep it up.
- synergy20 3y agothis is made in wxWidgets by the way, a cross platform c++ GUI framework like Qt but 100% free on the other hand inkscape is made with gtkmm(gtk), which also runs cross platform.
- jadbox 3y agoHow does wxw and gtk roughly compare? I have liked the UI of Audacity moderately more than Inkscape, but I don't know where framework versus implementation is at play.
- synergy20 3y agoI was with wxwidgets now switching to gtk, as the latter is way more widely used, wxwidgets is native looking for each OS, gtk has its own appearance, both shall do fine.
- badsectoracula 3y agowxWidgets uses whatever GUI functionality is native for each OS instead of implementing its own (though there is also a wxUniversal backend which does its own controls but i'm not sure how complete it is). On Linux wxWidgets can use Gtk, Qt or Motif (though Motif doesn't seem to be tested much and while it does compile and work, there are a bunch of bugs).
- CephalopodMD 3y agoThis is about halfway to a competent DAW (whereas before I feel we were at like 15%). You could really demo something pretty well with this I bet!
- tohnjitor 3y agoAudacity is a great suite of tools. Never thought to try to use it for arranging music but apparently now I can.
- Aachen 3y ago> You can now change the duration of your audio clips without affecting their pitch non-destructively. Audacity 3.4 uses a new time stretching algorithm specifically made for music, which outperforms many of the commercially available options. Way to bury the lede! What's this magic algorithm being spoken of, how does it work so well? > A more detailed overview of these changes can be found in our <a>changelog</a>. The changelog is even more terse, saying only which key combo activates it :( A way bigger deal to me is mentioned at the bottom of the "other changes" in said changelog: Opus support! Edit: wait, under "libraries" it says > lib-time-and-pitch implements a time stretching algorithm originating in Staffpad. It currently is one of the highest-quality time stretching algorithms for music on the market. Staffpad links to https://staffpad.net https://staffpad.net and seems to be some music app. The library name links to a Microsoft repository (https://github.com/audacity/audacity/tree/e4bc052201eb0e6e22956cb6426e88661713c6d6/libraries/lib-time-and-pitch https://github.com/audacity/audacity/tree/e4bc052201eb0e6e22...) with no readme. The source code is documentation enough :)
- dmix 3y ago> a new time stretching algorithm specifically made for music, which outperforms many of the commercially available options. I wonder how it compares to Ableton Live, warping was always a big part of Abelton.
- swyx 3y agoit would be nice to at least know in what ways it "outperforms many of the commercially available options.". is this asking too much?
- ksherlock 3y agoThis is the PR I believe Time stretching 2 of 6 make audio track stretching effective https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/5041 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/5041
- beepbooptheory 3y agoI just feel like, for just stretching stuff and staying in pitch, any off-the-shelf FFT-based method has near perfect results within a meaningful range anyway. It has felt like a solved problem for a while? What does the "high-quality" mean here?
- crazygringo 3y agoHave there been any improvements in noise reduction? That's what's always kept me from using Audacity in the past. I like the interface and operations and everything, but cleaning up audio (removing room tone mostly) has always been the first step in my workflow, and its built-in noise reduction has just been unusably terrible compared to basic commercial tools. Or is there a common plugin people use with it that I've never known about?
- lotsofpizza 3y agoTypically a noise reduction plugin installed with the DAW by default isn’t going to be amazing. People usually install their own preferred plugins when using a DAW. If you look up noise reduction VSTs you will get lots of results for paid and free plugins compatible with Audactiy. I don’t have a recommendation but googling “reddit cheap noise reduction vst” came up with a lot of viable recommendations.
- eliasmacpherson 3y agoif you were on Windows you could possibly do something to get this into Audacity: http://reaper.fm/reaplugs/ http://reaper.fm/reaplugs/ https://github.com/nbickford/REAPERDenoiser https://github.com/nbickford/REAPERDenoiser
- teilo 3y agoAudacity, despite its weaknesses compared to commercial tools, still excels at batch processing due to its Nyquist plugin suite. The macro tool is finicky, but you can still do things that nothing else can in a batch, like trimming leading and trailing silence and then adding an exact amount of silence to the front and end of a file. You would think functions so simple and obvious as this would already exist in Audition, RX, SpectraLayers, etc., but no.
- jacquesm 3y agoSox?
- defrost 3y agoTotal OG oldschool swiss army knife for audio processing | playing .. that takes me back. In the 1990s in a long workroom of sun workstations we rigged a rlogin sox script to play succesive parts of some spooky music as a co worker walked past each one late one night. https://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/ https://github.com/chirlu/sox https://github.com/chirlu/sox
- atoav 3y agoFfmpeg or sox can do the silence trimming for you on the command line. And it is totally reasonable to just have a script lying around that does that.
- intalentive 3y agoI take care of that stuff in Python, it’s pretty straightforward.
- kzrdude 3y agoAudacity is also commercial, even if it's free and open source. That's because Muse is developing it and has a commercial interest in it, and their goals now (partly) govern the project. For example, that also makes them vulnerable to "enshittification".
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- marssaxman 3y agoThis is a big deal! My primary use of Audacity was to create custom edits of tracks I wanted to mix, saving effort later when DJing. Aligning my edits with the beat grid always took a lot of work, so much so that I hacked up a different audio editor, trying to integrate beat detection (https://github.com/marssaxman/gum-audio https://github.com/marssaxman/gum-audio). Audacity felt like it was frustratingly behind the times in this regard; well, it's five years later now, but I'm glad to see they've made it happen.
- paul7986 3y agoDoes anyone know if there's an AI music app in which I can sing my melodies into and it then automatically adds AI drums, bass and other instruments? Be even cooler if i change my singing voice too I loved Apple's Music Memos (works still on some old iPhones) as I could strum my guitar and sing my songs in it to automagically with one click add AI drums and bass (tempo could be changed/edited). They discontinued the app a few years ago, unfortunately.
- shmerl 3y agoWhen is it switching to Qt? Their current interface is very clunky.
- clowncity 3y agoAny new shady telemetry?
- LWinterberg 3y agoAs you can see in https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835, the telemetry was never added.
- clowncity 3y agoI'm not sure what you think that thread says, but it seems to confirm telemetry was added, then they lock the thread to end the discussion. Which is always a sign of bad faith. Did you mean to link to another where they removed all the telemetry they added?
- LWinterberg 3y agoNote that it says "closed" at the top. Pull requests which are merged say "merged", like this one: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/5484 https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/5484 You can verify for yourself that there is no telemetry code in Audacity.
- clowncity 3y agoOh good. Hopefully you all learned something? Forgive me if I remain sceptical, though. I'll stick with the fork.
- LWinterberg 3y agoWe've definitely learned something. And I can forgive you being skeptical, all I ask from you is to also be skeptical of outrageous claims.
- tofflos 3y agoFeedback on release: - Overall great. - The tempo stretching example in the video was too subtle for me. I listened a few times and had trouble telling the difference. - The documentation at https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html is still for 3.3 which is a bit frustrating when trying out new features. Also the link labeled Manual that is displayed in the splash screen 404s for me. - It took a bit too long to scan my computer for plugins and at the end I was told some plugins were deemed incompatible but not why. Suggestions on next steps: - I want to download songs and map the tempo to the song. That way I can easily loop over few bars when practicing an instrument. - Today I use Ableton for this which can automatically detect the tempo of a clip, and align bar and beat markers to the song, without stretching the audio. It also does a decent job of following tempo variations within a clip. This all started working well in version 11.3.2. I tried to use Audacity for this and these were my impressions: - Opus support makes it easy to work with material from Youtube. - Adding clips to tracks obscures beat and bar markings making them difficult to align with transients. - Having to generate a metronome track is a bit clunky. - Stem separation would be a nice addition so that I could easily mute the instrument I'm playing.
- LWinterberg 3y ago> - The tempo stretching example in the video was too subtle for me. I listened a few times and had trouble telling the difference. that's the point of it. Being able to make 124 bpm samples cooperate with 110bpm samples without anyone ever noticing that it had happened. > - The documentation at https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html is still for 3.3 which is a bit frustrating when trying out new features. Also the link labeled Manual that is displayed in the splash screen 404s for me. the manual job always takes forever to complete, but support.audacityteam.org is updated. > - It took a bit too long to scan my computer for plugins and at the end I was told some plugins were deemed incompatible but not why. It tries to load the relevant VSTs in a child process and if the VST crashes the child process it gets flagged as incompatible. Audio plugins are awful and nobody ever follows the spec. All of the other things you mentioned are in various stages of being planned.
- QuantumGood 3y ago3.4 removes the functionality that clicking on a clip separator no longer joins clips, but I have long joined at separators by highlighting an area with join(s), then using this macro set to the keyboard shortcut "j": Join: SelectNone:
- EarthAmbassador 3y agoIs there a good reason why there isn't a hot key combo for zooming on tracks with a Mac in 2023? Command + is the standard for a lot of media editors in Mac OS.
- LWinterberg 3y agoAudacity predates this convention, it's Cmd+1,2,3,E,F for zoom in/neutral/out/selection/project at the moment. It definitely should be changed though.