Frankly I think Audacity was in dire need of polishing. People may not like this redesign but the original one wasn't great, especially for new users. With that said, the new icom looks absolutely hideous imo. It has no personality whatsoever.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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That logo hasn’t grown on me
Just use an old version of Audacity. Audacity was never a good DAW. It's like...
Sound Recorder is Notepad, Audacity is Wordpad, and your actual DAW is actual Word.
I've always seen the act of beefing-up and feature-bloating audacity as incredibly counter productive. Make it more efficient and lighter weight and streamline the UI. Make it start and stop VERY fast. And no logins or purchases or accounts or telemetry or any of that bullshit, Audacity is the desert island editor that requires no DRM or setup and will be the best balance of it-just-works and ability, given enough time.
That is why I use tenacity, it is excally what you discribed
Meh. Prefer Tenacity without the enshittification.
tenacity development looks somewhat moribund and lacks so many of audacity's added features and fixes like pasting audio. tenacity's release porting audacity's added realtime effects, beats and measures view, and opus support has only been present in an alpha released eight months ago.
Yeah, mee too. However, there wouldn't be any Tenacity without Audacity. Besides, Tenacity looks quite far from upstream commits. Doesn't paint a bright future for the fork. I wish more devs offered their help.
The dev team changed. Audacity wasn't always maintianed by Musescore, it was its own thing.
They aren't responsible for what Audacity was or what it in essence is. They did not create the app nor maintain it for most of its existance. New management is only a few years old.
What new management is responsible for is the new features, the redesign and turning Audacity into a shill for their online service.
There wouldn't be any under-new-management-Audacity without old Audacity just as Tenacity.
So saying something like what you did makes little sense and belittles Tenacity developers while raising new shills to the status of founding fathers.
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What's enshitified about it?
It's as Tantacrul (the new head designer of the app) would put it
A lot of little things that all add up
The app was taken over by the Musescore team, owned (as in, paid a salary by) a Russian private enterprise called UltimateGuitar.
They've already made a lot of really, really bad decisions in regards to Musescore itself.
If you don't know, Musescore is an app not too dissimilar to Audacity that UltimateGuitar took over some years before they did Audacity. And they did a bunch of moves the FOSS community dislikes.
They're bound to do the same to Audacity. They just had a lot less time to do it and a lot more pushback from the much larger (and as such more healthy) Audacity community.
As for Audacity, they've added a bunch of features. They also fixed core faults with the app: included nondestructive editing and fixed some UX issues.
Which is great.
However, these positive things are just the tip of the "changes" iceberg. And the bottom gets dark, fast.
To start off at the tip with the most pet-peevy thing ever, the new team tends to make bloat. In Musescore's case, Musescore 2 and 3 ran much faster than Musescore 4. It isn't even comparable, and Audacity is bound to follow the same path.
Then the new Audacity UI looks great, but it introduces its own issues. Such as turning the app's UI into a generic modern one, which some people dislike. With Musescore the changes were relatively contained, but Audacity's UI, UX and workflow was changed as fundamentally as it could have. Old Audacity and New Audacity are pretty much different tools to learn because of it (Old was a simle editor as they were way back when, and New is a DAW - a fundamentally different workflow with a vastly different UX philosophy).
Aa such, the switch to New Audacity is easier for users from any other DAW (such as Protools, Logic, Ableton) than for Old Audacity users. Because Old Audacity was never a traditional DAW.
Then there's the deeper layers: all the changes a for-profit overtake means for a FOSS project.
Still tame, but slightly underwater: Musescore was changed from a fully offline app to one tightly integrated into an online ecosystem. Musescore (the UltimateGuitar brand) really wants you not to save your files to your computer, but to their online score sharing platform musescore.com.
They also added telemetry and tracking to Musescore.
They also did a logo redesign for Musescore. At first it was the old logo, objectively fixed.
But after not even five years of new management, the old Musescore logo was fully scrapped "to be moved in line with other UltimateGuitar products" (to paraphrase the lead designer). In other words, it was stripped of its personality.
All of the same is bound to happen to Audacity.
In fact, the logo thing already has. Audacity's logo was also "brought in line."
And this new Audacity logo is especially abhorrent. Tantacrul (aforementioned head designer) adressed it in a video, but the explanation is very shallow to the point of being downright insulting. The community hates it since it quite literally removed all elements of the original.
The only resemblance of an element retained is the general "headphone" concept. But that's a very long strech. The new headphone looks more like a sperm than a headphone. If no one told you it was supposed to be one and not the other, you probably wouldn't even know.
Not even the colors were spared. The old logo featured navy blue headphones worn by a waveform with an orange core and yellow outer parts, resembling a flame. It's a genius concept for a logo (although the execution for the official renders of the logo was always admittedly very shabby).
The New Audacity logo is, again, a pinkish-purplish sperm. It's supposed to be a pair of headphones, but it's really not. It got rid of the genius concept combining three distinct elements: headphones (listening), a waveform (seeing) and flame (feeling). The new one posesses none. It's pure corporate soullessness. And an insult to anyone having any feeling for Audacity.
Afterwards they did revise their new logo by adding back the waveform as well. The improvement is marginal, and an insult is still an insult. And this one especially is as painful as they get.
With Audacity being a very popular and a communaly dear FOSS project, there have been a lot of community renders on the original Audacity logo. No one would have faulted UltimateGuitar for taking one directly or using multiple as inspiration to make their own minimalist version in line with their current brand identity and style (if only their style wasn't to kill the original that is).
It's not an impossible ask to achieve. Retaining essence and soul while giving the logo a new spin and incorporating it into a few simple (yet flexible enough) design rules is an enjoyable professional challenge for most designers. But that's most likely not the corporate goal and as such off-limits.
Instead the corporate goal is to throw everything out and replace it with a purple sperm. It wouldn't have been much worse had they chosen a brown poop emoji instead. It really is (and was) that terrible. And the entire community feels the same.
Perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to talk a bit about myself: Admittedly, I'm not too avid of an Audacity user. In fact, I learned of Tantacrul via Musescore and have seen the UltimateGuitar playbook play out on Musescore with my own eyes and felt its consequences on my own skin. It's a terrible feeling.
I've seen Tantacrul's Musescore video 2 weeks after it first aired. A few videos later, Tabtacrul announced that he'd become the head designer for the app. I was extatic and had high hopes for the app which were very much met. At first.
Things turned south quickly with new management. It's a terrible feeling. In fact, Musescore is a large part of the reason why I became such a vocal FOSS advocate. I wouldn't wish what happened to Musescore and its users to my worst enemies.
To move away from me and olback onto Audacity, there's also the "CLA thing". You can see the drama firsthand on GitHub (link). But what I'd specifically like to point out is not the main post (read the first paragraph and skim the rest, it isn't worth reading), but rather the comments under it which do a good job at disspelling the talking points used in the post itself. The commenters over there are much more competent at linking good sources than me, so please feel free to click on some.
That being said, this entire situation with both Audacity and MuseScore is part of a larger trend of "corporate FOSS takeovers" where FOSS projects get taken over by new management, a bunch of work gets done in a few years and then the projects stop being FOSS via various nefarious means.
A nice example of past corporate FOSS takeovers is listed quite nicely here, but it doesn't give any nuance nor list the common strategies used, or how both the app and its users are harmed by that.
There's also a nice discussion over on lemmy.ca (this one), but it requires quite a bit of background in FOSS terminology to be fully graspable.
Some more info on the Audacity situation is also listed here, and a more lenghty discussion is available on the forum "Hacker News" (link).
Hope these links feed at least some inquisitive minds.
the switch to New Audacity is easier for users from any other DAW (such as Protools, Logic, Ableton) than for Old Audacity users
as an Old Audacity user I disagree with that. it is still extremely hard to use audacity as a DAW because it's very much still a multitrack audio editor with some beat-based features and non-destructive effects. i don't think clips were too hard to adjust to
Musescore was changed from a fully offline app to one tightly integrated into an online ecosystem.
I am also an old Musescore user. You would be a little right to talk about audio.com and pretty on the nail to talk about MuseHub but musescore.com absolutely not. musescore.com's been a thing since 2010 (MuseScore was only founded 2008 and acquired 2017) with the "Save Online" feature. Hal Leonard sued this small project for storing copyvio scores back in the old '10s (and now Muse Group owns Hal Leonard). And it's not like they've "integrated" it any more either; it's just blumming uploading scores same as it always has been since 2010.
look at MuseHub. those shiny new effects and mixing, we advertise them so much, they're free, they're groundbreaking, you have to use proprietary MuseHub. the entire Muse Sounds stack is proprietary. and even then you can still use MuseScore entirely offline to do anything it could do in 3.x (that's pre-acquisition for those unfamiliar with MuseScore version numbers).
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They tried to add in opt out telemetry in. A few forks were created as a result.
isn’t audacity spyware now? or did they stop that
they stopped that very soon after the controversy started
The fact that they even considered this, made me lose trust in them. Tenacity FTW.
i never understood the vitriol against debug-only opt-in telemetry
I'll venture, it's a natural if misdirected immune reaction from people who are all too aware they are being tracked ceaselessly and relentlessly, all day, everyday, not to their benefit. So sure, this one piece of software swears its own tracking is just for debugging purposes... But why risk it?
that does explain a lot, thank you! /genuine
It only became opt-in when people found out.
And it's not the only problem I have with Audacity, this is from an article in slashgear
"...For example, it says that it collects data necessary for law enforcement but doesn't specify what kind of data is collected.
There are also questions regarding the storage of data, which is located in servers in the USA, Russia, and the European Economic Area. IP addresses, for example, are stored in an identifiable way for a day before being hashed and then stored in servers for a year. The new policy also disallows people under the age of 13 from using the software, which, as FOSS Post points out, is a violation of the GPL license that Audacity uses."
it was always opt-in.
people finding out: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835#issuecomment-833778895
people highlight the opt-in dialog text: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835#discussion_r627756976
there are no commits in between; it could not have been changed to opt-in "when people found out" as you claim.
Perhaps you are right, I could be remembering it wrong (but really I don't feel like wading through that comment-section), the telemetry was just the tip of the iceberg for me, violating GPL licence and things like using google and yandex are among many reasons I just don't trust them with my music.
the google and yandex thing is the telemetry thing, and i talk about the privacy policy (the GPL thing you mention) below. what are the other reasons? all i see is the CLA thing which is very very legit, but again all of these things are from four or five years ago, and we can always riot when they do turn it proprietary.
It only became opt-in when people found out.
source? this is an open-source respository and everything i've found contradicts that
the privacy policy thing was a different thing that was definitely a strike in my eyes, but keep in mind that they reverted that too pretty soon after controversy, claimed it was overzealous lawyering, and it's been four years since without any further incidents.
First, it was never meant to be opt in.
Second, that's like saying you don't see the problem with the Nuremberg laws.
Taken out of context, they're bad.
Taken in context, they're the first step towards something much, much worse.
And when such a canary in the coalmine dies the rational response is to not understand how it died and proceed further down the mine.
it was never meant to be opt in.
Source? I've posted numerous pieces of evidence to the contrary:
people finding out: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835#issuecomment-833778895
people highlight the opt-in dialog text: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835#discussion_r627756976
there are no commits in between; it could not have been changed to opt-in "when people found out" as you claim.
For one thing the Nuremberg Laws (1935) prohibit interracial marriage. That alone is bad. I also believe laws that restrict citizenship are bad. Of course I see a big problem with allat.
There were also many more "incidents" in the four years following the Nuremberg Laws... Audacity, none.
Just like the laws, that's just the first step. Today it's opt in and soon enough it'll have no opt-out.
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Let's say, they had the Audacity
Oh, that's good to hear.
technically it was never shipped and only planned to be enabled in testing builds, and no code ever touched anything outside of audacity on the computer except maybe hardware and dependency details though i’d have to check again for those
edit: besides audacity stuff it only collected the audacity sqlite3 engine and OS version
It adds two toolbar buttons, share audio and get plugins, which seem to be only usable with an audio.com account and are not removable. Bummer.
Audacity is fine but its operations are destructive. I've been trying to learn Ardour, but it's a completely different beast...
I don't think OP's link mentions it but iirc one of the major changes in Audacity 4.0 is supposed to be non-destructive editing. At least that's what I think I remember hearing like a year or more ago.
It already supports realtime audio plugins now, which are non-destructive.
Does anyone know if Audacity 4.0 allows for more recording tracks at a time? Last I tried, it could only record to a single stereo track at a time.
Fwiw try out Reaper. Much easier and more professional than ardour, but unfortunately not open source. It supports a custom JavaScript system for making your own plugins on the fly, though, and is crazy powerful.
Thanks for the advice
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