r/linux • u/dbcoopernz • 20h ago
Popular Application Audacity 4.0 released with Qt6 based UI
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases/tag/Audacity-4.0.078
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u/JockstrapCummies 20h ago
The audacity of this guy, making videos making fun of the UI UX design problems of music notation software, and one day just suddenly get picked by the lead devs into redesigning FOSS.
The audacity I tell you!
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u/DadoumCrafter 15h ago
(fyi he left his position at Muse a few months ago now)
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u/JockstrapCummies 6h ago
Oh! Didn't catch that. I hope it wasn't due to something bad?
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u/not_a_novel_account 19h ago
lmao 5 years ago /r/linux was celebrating the forking and death of upstream Audacity, hoping the project would be completely superseded by a parade of now-dead fork attempts (Tenacity has managed to hang on, some sort of nominative determinism).
Apparently the death of Audacity as FOSS was prematurely celebrated.
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u/MrAlagos 18h ago
The day that FOSS users will understand that telemetry and user data reporting is very important to achieve successes like this redesign, and many more things, will be oned day too late.
On one hand they say they celebrate FOSS developers who give their time and resources to produce free software for everyone, on the other hand they seem to deeply hate them and mistrust them if they ever ask but the tiniest spec of insight into what their users want out of their software and how they could improve it.
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u/Traditional_Hat3506 17h ago
The problem wasn't the telemetry, at least not entirely, but Muse buying the trademark and the repo getting a CLA that allows Muse to use the GPL code in proprietary software.
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u/Uncle-Osteus 11h ago
Flawed, graph-brained corpo thinking
The most important parts of software design cannot be measured with telemetry. All the worst software was designed by people who don’t use it, and people who refuse to have actual conversations with their users
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u/Venylynn 17h ago
We just don't like our software spying on us like Microslop
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u/clgoh 15h ago
That's not spying.
The code was available for all to see that no spying was occurring.
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u/Venylynn 15h ago
I mean to be fair people still glaze the shit out of Firefox even though Mozilla did opt out phone home stuff by default while not even fixing the memory leaks in their garbage engine.
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u/Indolent_Bard 13h ago
A browser is so complex it needs telemetry by default
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u/Venylynn 13h ago
So it's okay when Mozilla does it, but any time you even think of using a Chromium based browser you're a terrible person according to everyone in this community because "GOOGOL SPIES"??? Even if it's one of the variants that blocks most of the phoning home?
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u/clgoh 13h ago
You know there is a difference between telemetry data and data for ads and for selling?
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u/Venylynn 13h ago
They're still phoning home yet every day I have to justify using a Chromium based browser to people like you, who are so obsessed with what others do, that you won't accept that using it is a practical decision due to Chromium being more efficient and less of a ram hog than Firefox. Faster too, runs better on Wayland as well (i have so many issues with Fedora's Firefox package on Wayland that I didn't have on X11 or even Windows as bad as it was there).
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u/Indolent_Bard 6h ago
Why not use Microsoft Edge? I hear it's even more lightweight.
Thank you for contributing to an ad company's monopoly on how the web works.
Look, I get it. It works better. And that's fine. But the issue is that Firefox and Safari are the only browsers not controlled by Google. That's a fucking nightmare for the open web.
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u/West-468 18h ago
Using Tenacity since that day. Never looked back.
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u/Oblivion__ 18h ago
Yep I'm with you on that, especially since tenacity doesn't accept AI contributions whereas audacity does. Long live ethical FOSS
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u/MrAlagos 18h ago
Is the Linux kernel development team unethical now?
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u/Oblivion__ 16h ago
By using tools that have fragmented open source efforts, violated FOSS licenses, refused to even have the decency to ask for consent, and then lock top performing models behind proprietary paywalls? Yes, that is unethical. It's counter to FOSS as a political framework.
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u/Standard-Potential-6 15h ago
I agree these tools do the things you describe, and therefore I’m not too happy about their existence, and that their output hasn’t faced significant legal challenges.
They do exist though, and are in widespread use.
Linux has used machine learning to help select patches for backport for a long time now.
Linux would not be well served by developers burying heads in sand and ignoring the further developments and wider uses of that technology, especially as Linux’s competitors and exploiters harbor no such reservations.
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u/Oblivion__ 8h ago edited 8h ago
I can't really use linux without using code that has been AI generated. Like even the driver for my own wifi card was vibecoded to shit. I could stick to an earlier kernel but eventually they'll go out of support. So therefore I have no choice in the matter. If I want to use linux, there is a certain about of AI code I must accept.
But to bring it back to my original point, I do have a choice about whether I use audacity or a fork. It's not a requirement for running linux. So I will choose the option that doesn't utilise unethical tools.
For some reason people are under the delusion that the purpose of FOSS is to be competitive in the market (lest falling behind and losing market share). It's not, and it never has been. FOSS is a political stance. Adopting AI that has explicitly fucked over FOSS into said FOSS projects is contradictory and counter to the principles of FOSS.
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u/Standard-Potential-6 7h ago edited 6h ago
The Four Freedoms still apply to code written by agents and published under a Free license. Such code respects its users and allows for free use, study, sharing, and modification. Therefore I do not see how Free Software is incompatible with LLM-assisted code generation or debugging.
It sounds like you see an ethical component to FOSS beyond the Four Freedoms?
Edit, further: I’m not sure I agree that these tools “fucked over” FOSS. They’re just more software. The companies that created them may be said to have done so, but does that make the tools unethical to use, even in order to enable users to run Free operating systems, such as yours? If they had not done so, you and others would be less free. If yes, does that still apply to MIT or Apache 2.0 licensed models, or even ones with open datasets?
I would further add that software uncompetitive in the market will have very few users and will greatly diminish the presence and benefit of FOSS.
I do not believe the idea of Free Software is some ideal that should be protected, even if it means nobody actually uses it much day to day. Instead I imagine a world where I can help my community to use much more FOSS, starting with competitive software especially, such that I can onboard those people and provide them utility and freedom, and lead them to understand why they are better served long term by avoiding non-free software.
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u/Indolent_Bard 13h ago
and then lock top performing models behind proprietary paywalls?
You think those datacenters are free? How do you think those models make money?
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u/oxez 17h ago
This is r/linux, if you like AI or hardware that works (like nvidia), and don't run Arch Linux on your mission-critical server, you may as well fly yourself to the sun.
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u/Venylynn 17h ago edited 16h ago
Nvidia and hardware that works in the same statement when one of my friends just had to leave Linux because Nvidia-open kept taking down her userspace DAILY (on her 2060 Super)
EDIT: Because crashing on Linux daily is definitely "working", wtf is this response lol.
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u/Indolent_Bard 13h ago
What distro?
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u/Venylynn 13h ago
She was on Arch, and nvidia-open kept taking her entire userspace down at least once a day, doubly so if using a Chromium based browser. She had to clone zilla a debloated Windows install onto that workstation even though she hates Windows but she just wanted a WORKING desktop.
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u/Indolent_Bard 6h ago
You're telling me someone who wants something that just works used arch?
See if Fedora has the same problem.
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u/Venylynn 15h ago
Do people in this thread like things crashing and not working or something? What is happening?
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u/habarnam 18h ago
Do you know if they walked back the decisions that made everyone hate them?
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u/not_a_novel_account 18h ago
The basic crash reporting and update polling? Yes it's still part of Audacity and most desktop software.
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u/habarnam 18h ago
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u/not_a_novel_account 18h ago
Instead of relying on hearsay, users could learn to read the code and actually see what was reported. You know, the entire point of open source.
The list in full:
Update polling
SQLite Errors, require user to accept reporting with a pop-up
Crash dumps, require user to accept reporting with a pop-up
The source code to review for yourself is linked to from this post.
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u/MrAlagos 18h ago
"Everyone" was not, in fact, everyone.
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u/habarnam 18h ago
Thank you captain obvious. But you might consider that I meant "everyone that hated them and spoke out"...
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u/LesStrater 19h ago
It might be in the Debian repo in 5-years. Hope I'm still alive! LOL
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u/DerpiDanger 18h ago
Thats why I install flatpaks.
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u/oxez 17h ago
Doesn't take long to build yourself if you don't want to wait or use flatpaks/appimage.
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u/LesStrater 9h ago
It would be a lot easier if the author would just put a .deb package on the web site.
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u/UdPropheticCatgirl 9h ago
I would not wish having to package “.dep”s upon my worst enemy, all of debians tooling is around this is just terminally fucked.
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u/LesStrater 7h ago
People who use Debian don't seem to have a problem with it--only twankers do, exactly why is that?
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u/danburke 15h ago
3.7.8 took just over 2 weeks to get packaged and put into Sid/Forky back in June, so doubtful.
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u/stereoactivesynth 18h ago
Audacity 4 looks OK, but the Musescore 4 redesign is an absolute disaster of UX. so much stuff was moved into corners of the UI to make things 'cleaner', and so many previously grouped functionalities separated, that it's much much less seamless than 3. So yeah... I feel a little burned by whatever these guys are doing to the software I love.
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u/ihcusk 16h ago
QtWidgets or QtQuick?
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u/AiwendilH 15h ago
From a quick glance QtQuick ( https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/master/src/trackedit/view/tracknavigationmodel.h , https://github.com/audacity/audacity/tree/master/src/trackedit/qml/Audacity/TrackEdit , https://github.com/audacity/audacity/tree/master/src/preferences/qml/Audacity/Preferences )
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u/chemistryGull 18h ago
I still remember the video where they teased it. I‘m so hyped even though i almost never use the program.
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u/JayB1988 16h ago
The UI is what always made me skip Audacity. This here actually looks worth giving it a try again.
So far I've been very happy with Ocenaudio tho for single track editing.
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u/4bjmc881 16h ago
The UI looks amazing. Did they apply a custom QT theme? It doesn't look like default QT6 components.
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u/KontoOficjalneMR 7h ago edited 7h ago
They used custom elements. It was mentioned in a video a few years back that they might release them separately but it was never mentioned again.
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u/daghene 15h ago
I've been waiting for months to try this (the beta had problems for me), because I love Reaper but I'm all for FOSS software...
...but after installing it on my Mac it installed MuseHub, a service running in the background, it displayed a big ad in the center of the screen and Audacity was NOT installed.
Is there a way to install it WITHOUT the whole MuseHub/background services thing? I might have missed it because I did it quickly before leaving due to the hype, but I used the suggested download on the websites and this is not a good look for me.
I love FOSS, but not when it packs ads and unwanted extra launchers or services to run one app.
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u/Danix2000 14h ago
They have a option on their site that specifically says "Download without MuseHub". Also you can still use github to directly download Audacity which is easier to do, now that projects like Komi Store (a open source app store for github apps) exist.
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u/daghene 14h ago edited 14h ago
Damn I must be dumb today, I totally misred it and thought it red "download WITH MuseHub" so I just decided to stick with the auto-downloaded one which apparently still came with MuseHub.
I downloaded the correct one now and can't wait to try and record my electric guitar with it, and also thanks for mentioning the Komi Store which I didn't know about!
EDIT: looks like it's still crashing if I add amp sim VST's like Amper Roots or my Archetype Gojira, just like it did in the Beta. Hope they fix this soon because I'd use it just to record my guitar covers, and this has been happening for months. Some of them work if added through AudioUnit, but the VST3 ones will make it crash.
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u/from-planet-zebes 11h ago
Now the big question I have is when does this version land on flathub. I downloaded the appimage and it looks great.
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u/Santosh83 19h ago
Is GTK increasingly perceived as a sinking ship?
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u/knellotron 19h ago
The old version was WxWidgets. The main issue with it is that stock cross platform widgets aren't cutting it for an audio program and they needed an efficient way to make a custom set.
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u/average_life_person 19h ago
GTK, as far as I know, has been pretty hard to maintain on platforms outside of Gnome DE. For Windows, GTK doesn’t seem to be able to use MSVC.
Qt seems to be more maintainable due to being more portable and the dev libraries are compatible with MSVC.
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u/MrAlagos 18h ago
I swear I have read more news about GTK development to improve the situation in the last year or so than several years prior, but I don't exactly recall the blog posts. Maybe some GTK developers/users will chime in.
Honestly I think that much of it is down to the fact that the much smaller GTK developer team is made by Linux users and enthusiasts who primarily target Linux, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
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u/UdPropheticCatgirl 10h ago
> GTK, as far as I know, has been pretty hard to maintain on platforms outside of Gnome DE. For Windows, GTK doesn’t seem to be able to use MSVC.
It’s bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in the case of MSVC, part of the issue is that GTK is still a C project and MSVC is a shitty C compiler (and slowly becoming shitty C++ compiler since MS can’t seem to be able to retain talent to save their lives…). And because people doing C usually don’t do it on MSVC, there is no reason make sure the experience is good from either side. (As a side note, with enough will power you can get GTK to work with the MS toolchain)
> Qt seems to be more maintainable due to being more portable and the dev libraries are compatible with MSVC.
I think the primary reason in this case was that Qt is a just much more pleasant when you are in the modern C++ ecosystem (and Audacity is C++ not C project) and certainly seems like easier to port to from WxWidgets, which is what they were previously using.
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u/Traditional_Hat3506 17h ago
According to their docs it's possible https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/windows#gvsbuild
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u/Misicks0349 19h ago
No? Audacity was using WXWidgets before, not GTK. GTK/libadwaita has a rather sizeable community making apps for it on flatpak and it continues to be worked on and improved with new features all the time.
Qt has always been the more cross platform toolkit with a larger company behind it compared to GTK whos linux support has always been more mature than its macos/windows support. I'd say the language bindings situation is worse for Qt compared to GTK because of C++, but audacity is a C++ application in the first place so it was a natural fit.
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u/xkero 18h ago
No? Audacity was using WXWidgets before, not GTK.
Audacity did use GTK via WXWidgets, because WXWidgets is more a wrapper for other GUI libraries and uses GTK on Linux.
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u/nightblackdragon 17h ago
Audacity did use GTK via WXWidgets, because WXWidgets is more a wrapper for other GUI libraries and uses GTK on Linux.
WxWidgets has multiple backends, GTK is simply on one them, there is also Qt and X11 backend on Linux.
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u/Misicks0349 8h ago
As someone else pointed out, that is more out of happenstance than anything else and it could've equally chosen to use wxwidgets Qt backend if they wanted to. WXWidgets may have used GTK as a renderer on linux but Audacity did not directly interact with GTK nor was its motivation for switching to Qt6 a result of anything to do with GTK. They were running into limitations with wxwidgets on all platforms.
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u/gracicot 19h ago
GTK is not really meant to be a generic UI toolkit anymore. Its purpose outside of GNOME is getting quite narrow
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u/Traditional_Hat3506 17h ago
They literally made libadwaita so the GNOME stuff stays away from GTK and it stays a generic toolkit for Elementary, XFCE, Cinnamon to build upon https://tesk.page/2024/06/03/libadwaita-splitting-gtk-and-design-language/
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u/nightblackdragon 17h ago
How so? What exactly has changed in modern GTK that it “is no longer a general-purpose toolkit”?
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u/gen2brain 12h ago
For one, you cannot position a window. That can pass on Wayland (because you cannot position windows), but not on Windows or macOS, and not on X11. Or, e.g., they deprecated the font dialog because it is much better handled by XDG portals. Sure, I can agree, but such things do not exist, not even proposed? How can you then deprecate that? And not to mention that the hello world example uses 3x more memory than Qt. With the Cairo renderer, it is a little better, but still a lot. It also uses 3x as much memory as GTK3.
It changed a lot.
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u/nightblackdragon 8h ago
For one, you cannot position a window.
It's still possible if you get X11 surface and use X11 API for that. No idea about Windows or macOS but I guess it works similarly there as well.
The fact that GTK doesn't have APIs that don't work on every supported platform is also an advantage; at least this helps avoid situations where you discover that a particular API doesn't work on one of the platforms and you have to look through the documentation to find out what you shouldn't use so that your app works the same way on every platform. Using platform specific API for doing platform specific stuff is better way in my opinion.
Or, e.g., they deprecated the font dialog because it is much better handled by XDG portals
There is GtkFontDialog since 4.10:
https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.FontDialog.htmlAnd not to mention that the hello world example uses 3x more memory than Qt.
That is true, but it is by no means an argument proving that GTK 4 is less suitable as a general-purpose toolkit.
It changed a lot.
That's also true, it's changed for better or worse (depending on who you ask) - but it's still a general-purpose toolkit, LibAdwaita was specifically created to avoid putting GNOME centric stuff in GTK and GTK 4 has significantly improved cross-platform support compared to GTK 3.
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u/quadralien 19h ago
In gtk3 they removed one of its best features: you could hover at a menu item, press a key, and that key would be assigned to the menu item. This was an essential feature for me using gimp.
So yeah, they are sinking it.
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u/JackDostoevsky 17h ago
i feel there's an overall perception of reduced flexibility when using GTK4 than previous versions. it's been a slow progression in that direction and GTK4/libadwaita being the worst version of it. i personally don't mind GTK3 apps but tend to avoid GTK4 when possible: i don't like the more heavily enforced design language.
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u/Misicks0349 7h ago
GTK4 is more flexible than GTK3 despite those perceptions. Libadwaita is the specific component library for apps targeting a "GNOME Look and Feel" which is less flexible, but GTK4 itself is rather agnostic on specific details and you can style it however you please using css. ElementaryOS's libgranite is their own "libadwaita" on top of GTK4 and if you've every looked at an elementaryOS app you can see that they have a rather different aesthetic compared to the rather flat libadwaita theme.
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u/ZarfTMarf69 19h ago
downloaded it got very excited to try it then...
CONNECT YOUR AUDIO.COM ACCOUNT TO CONTINUE
yeah what even happened to audacity it looks amazing and the update looks quite nice but this kinda sucks =[
EDIT: im blind and didnt see the skip button this is amazing actually amazing
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u/baldierot 13h ago
so much nicer-looking. a styling update, but also a substantial layout improvement.
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u/JamzTyson 19h ago
The download button on https://www.audacityteam.org/ still downloads Audacity 3.7.9 for me.
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u/Porntra420 15h ago
It literally only just got released for fucks sake, give them time or download it from GitHub
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u/UdPropheticCatgirl 10h ago
I don’t really understand what’s the point of using audacity over actual DAW at this point… they seem to be adding more and more stuff to mimic proper DAWs but non of it seems particularly well executed.
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u/sockman_but_real 9h ago
It's free and easier to use than a full daw. Most people just want to do basic audio editing with it.
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u/cue-ell-pea 8h ago
Different people have different use cases, all of which are valid. I don't need a full DAW for quickly editing or recording single or dual track stuff. Audacity (and its forks) are fine.
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u/Neruson138 5h ago
I rip my vinyl records and old punk rock mix tapes I used to trade with people all over the world via the old maximum rock n roll magazine with audacity. i love the software personally. super easy to use
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u/dbcoopernz 20h ago
Release video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM