Audacity 4 Rebuilds the Open Source Audio Editor But Leaves Some Features Behind (nerds.xyz)
- Reference: 0185404416
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/03/163216/audacity-4-rebuilds-the-open-source-audio-editor-but-leaves-some-features-behind
- Source link: https://nerds.xyz/2026/09/audacity-4/
> Audacity 4.0 has been [2]released with a rebuilt Qt interface, a new clip-editing model, customizable workspaces, native high-DPI rendering, and a new AUP4 project format. The open source audio editor also [3]adds ASIO playback and recording support to official Windows builds , while bringing major changes to recording, playback, plugins, and project handling. The overhaul comes with some tradeoffs. Audacity 4.0 currently lacks several features found in Audacity 3, including Time Tracks, Note and MIDI tracks, Mixer, Macro Manager and scripting pipe, VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting, and play-at-speed. The developers say they plan to bring the missing functionality back in future releases.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~BrianFagioli
[2] https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases/tag/Audacity-4.0.0
[3] https://nerds.xyz/2026/09/audacity-4/
Huh (Score:1)
Purely coincidentally asked Omarchy to clone and build the same just a minute ago - able to record background office noise and play it back ðY
Downloading felt very scammy (Score:2)
They encourage you to download the "installer," which involves a lengthy come-on from Muse, the company that is maybe funding the rewrite?
Re: (Score:2)
I mean from the Audacity site, not downloading the builds from Github.
Re: (Score:2)
I have seen that happen on some sites. There's a re-direction to download something that is not connected with the thing you're after. You can usually get around it, but watch out for it.
Re:Not sure what it's for exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never met a DAW that didn't have a nightmare UI.
Audacity does not.
If I just want to futz with a audio clip, Audacity is the first choice.
Re: (Score:2)
> I've never met a DAW that didn't have a nightmare UI.
Best I've ever used is the old Syntrillium CoolEditPro, before Adobe screwed it up in the later versions of Audition.
Second best is Live. It's fairly intuitive for doing basic things. It gets iffy when doing more complicated track layouts, but all DAWs do.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. It's a no-nonsense way to do basic audio tasks. I use other DAWs (Reaper at the moment) for more complicated things, but Audacity has one killer feature which is loopback recording -- allows easy recording from online sources, videos, etc., anything that goes through your computer speakers.
I just tried the new version, and the UI is clean and friendly, and the loopback feature is still there!
It's not ready then (Score:3)
Why should people who use those features get screwed just by upgrading to the latest version? The great disease in software of the past 15 years or so has been taking things which work and are finished, and continuing to change them until they no longer work. Sounds like another instance of that.
Tenacity Fork (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone just tuning in, MuseCY Holdings Ltd. (a.k.a. Muse Group) [1]bought out Audacity in 2021. [tenacityaudio.org] Development direction has been iffy ever since; see the aforelinked history page for details. The fork, Tenacity, looks good but isn't available in many distros' official repos—likely because dust took so long to settle when Muse Group set off an explosion of forks by injecting Audacity with spyware (since reverted).
[1] https://tenacityaudio.org/docs/_content/Introduction_and_Motivation.html#history
"bring the missing functionality back in future" (Score:4, Interesting)
Whenever I see this sort of statement, it means it's gone. If they could readily do it in a non-janky way, they'd have done it before release; the re-architecture was too fundamental to accommodate it. Particularly on an open source project, where nobody is forcing them to release on a specific schedule.
Re: (Score:2)
I think this is generally true, but at the same time don't forget that OSS is built by highly motivated people.
In other words, it doesn't matter if a thousand people all say "we want this" ... if no one is willing to implement it. But, if even one user cares enough about the feature to build a patch for it (that the maintainers will accept), virtually any lost feature could be recovered.
Re:"bring the missing functionality back in future (Score:4, Informative)
Open source doesn't rely simply on users making code changes, it relies on a specific subset of users. Feature developers are users who are also coders and who are also able to get up to speed on the project and who are also skilled enough to implement it and are also able to navigate the politics of the project .
If the feature didn't get implemented, that person for the original implementation has probably already left the project long ago. In many cases because they weren't a supporter of the re-architecture.
It could be because a given feature-developer wanted the production release before they wanted that feature, which would sound plausible if it were one or two significant features left behind. But once you have to start counting the missing major functionality on more than one hand, that points more at the fundamentals of the re-architecture than personal feature-developer priorities.
Re: "bring the missing functionality back in futur (Score:2)
I have vague memories of an audacity interview years ago where the dev mentioned they had tight coupling between the UI and features at the time. It might simply be they wanted to get it in people's hands because new features were tied to the new UI.
Re: (Score:3)
Audacity has been on a very long journey to modernize itself. It wouldn't shock me to learn that they shipped it with functions that are being most widely used or easiest to carry over just to get over the hurdle of getting a major release out the door. It's a beloved tool; I know a bunch of people for whom it's a production linchpin, and I think the developers working on are aware of the number of edge cases where only some tiny fraction of their users make use of a feature. Those people can stay on versio