alt Hacker NewsAudacity 4.0
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I've given up on Audacity because it hasn't kept up technically with how a typical home studio Linux system does audio, and looking at the change log it seems like they haven't addressed any of the problems I have with it in version 4.
You'd think, well, it supports JACK, so you're gold on both JACK and Pipewire, but they only do this in an extremely annoying way. It doesn't create a persistent JACK client. Only when you start playback or recording does it temporarily create a JACK client which disappears when playback or recording stops taking any connections you've made to it with it. The temporary JACK client then must autoconnect to a sink or source, for whatever reason that is neither a limitation of PW nor JACK.
So you'll undo this jank with an automatic connection manager, right? You'll configure it to immediately disconnect from whatever Audacity decided to connect to and automatically connect it to the source you want to record. Well, they've given the short-lived JACK client the brilliant and informative name "PortAudio", which is of course shared by other applications using portaudio. Even more brilliantly, the I/O ports are given new names on each new client!
Some while ago I started Audacity up (having forgotten that it's broken) and got invited to a user survey. There was no concern at all in the survey about the thing that Audacity fundamentally does. Do I want it to be a DAW? Do I want to be able to buy plugins within it? Do I want AI features?
Merely being asked these questions while their broken JACK implementation persists pissed me off. I want it to record and play back audio first of all. Audacity 4 looks like it's in the bizarre situation where it kind of looks like a well-designed DAW but behaves like it doesn't care about audio.
I have been using Audacity 3 for making music with samples for a few years. And it sort of worked, but there were a lot of things that were inconvenient, like the project sometimes not saving, or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip.
I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them.
Whatever happened with the post-telemetry fork debacle projects? Tenacity, Sneedacity, or something...
How's the telemetry situation nowadays? I haven't been updating my copy for a while.
in the age of 500MB apps (thanks to electron); it is refreshing to see a sub-50MB app again.
Is the team funded off audacity merch sales? What's the most effective way for me to support the continuity of their work?
The direction Audacity has been heading now is ok, but it's not for me. I really miss the days when it was just an editor for audio files. I have a DAW already, thanks, but I do still need to just quickly pop open a sample file to trim, normalize, maybe stretch it. I don't want to create a "project" or save really anything other than the edited audio.
As always, abandoning GTK (or libadwaita. ew.) for Qt is a welcome change. Good for them.
Downloaded the AppImage, chmod +x and ran it from my user space on Debian Trixie under Gnome. I went for light, colourful and modern UI, skipped the login/cloud invite, disabled the telemetry and started it up.
Quite chatty when running it from the terminal, but seems to be working well on my Thinkpad X250 landfill laptop. Looks 'flat' and all in the modern style, but adapts to the 1366x768 letterbox that is my screen nicely.
Looks great. I remember a company sort of bought it but afaict they didn’t monetize it. I don’t remember the strategy, or why it was acquired, does anyone recall it?
>> The following Audacity 3 features are not available in Audacity 4.0, but we're working on adding them in future releases.
Time Tracks Note/MIDI tracks Mixer Macro Manager and the scripting pipe VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting Play-at-speed Sync-Lock and the old tool modes were replaced by the workflows described above.
>>Additionally, Audacity 4 ships with some missing exporting and rendering features, analyzers, and effects.
Love what Audacity has become, especially the new UI that does not look like it was forced through some scrum pipeline
I remember using this software when I was 13 y.o. (I'm 31 now). I would turn songs I liked backwards to try to find satanic messages. Good memories haha.
After I change from "Program Files" to a user's folder it brings up the UAC.
Why? The "files association still needs it" is not an answer. It is plain unnecessary risk, does not matter that the original author is trusted, still can be hacked.
For some reason, almost all audio apps have very odd scroll and zooming behaviour (and home/end keys also do weird things). Also doing basic things like starting playback or recording from start or from cursor tends to be quite complex in many of them. It would be interesting to know why that is so. Maybe it is so that you don't accidentally trigger it? If you're just doing editing and never recording, you never want to trigger recording with r, only with some complex modifier combo. But if you're a musician, that's about all you do, hit record and stop and playback and stop.
Love to see a winamp-era software evolving to this beauty. Enveloppes and UI colors looks like ableton in a good way.
So it's not native anymore. One of the coolest things Audacity had, at least for me, was the fact it was built using wxWidgets.
I also wonder how is the Muse group perceived nowadays? I remember them acquiring Audacity was a huge mess when it happened due to them introducing telemetry. Never used Audacity since then.
I have used old audacity and musescore-owned audacity, and I have to say it's a massive glow-up.
I use REAPER for most things, but audacity has found a nice little niche when it comes to recording voice clips because it just does it with less hassle.
It's in good hands.
Hahah - I woke up this morning going "I want to use something like Audacity, but doesn't create such enormous project files".
Hoping they've fixed that, looking forward to it! UI looks great too!
I'd love to understand better how they can afford a 10+ person team working on this and then give it all away for free. After paying the original Audacity creators a fair chunk of money to buy it, even. Is that audio.com sign in screen really bringing in that much money?
I mean I love it, to be fair when it got acquired I didn't have high hopes given how these things usually go, but Muse has so far been a spectacular steward and this huge redesign+refactor effort is a clear testament to that.
Whoa what a glow up!
I hope aup4 is smaller than aup3, because my number one headache with Audacity is file size bloat. Otherwise I love it!
The video on their audio editor would have been much more interesting and widely useful if they instead showed how they made their beautiful video. There is much more combined video and audio editing going on than audio-editing alone and doing this well is difficult and time-consuming.
Audacity and Avidemux have allowed me to look much more skilled in media editing than I have any right to claim
What I really hope for is searchable filters. With filter packs installed I simply cannot find them in slow scrolling menu list.
I've always loved audacity, but have always found its editing workflow to be hard to use. This seems an improvement.
P.S.: I don't care for looks, but UX seems better. I will try it.
2 reminders that I find always need to be mentioned in audacity threads:
1) Audacity is not a DAW. I love it, it’s an incredibly robust tool. But I would not use it like a fully fledged DAW.
2) Reaper isn’t free. They have an incredibly generous “try before you buy” license, and you should reward them by paying $40 if you use it and decide it is a tool you want to continue to use!
Anyone else watch the video and catch Dunder Mifflin @ 4:11?
Using this for my webcam background moving forward!
I didn't even know I wanted this! Always nice to see a great product made even better.
Looks like most of the timeline editing feature could be successfully ported to Kdenlive (FOSS for video-editing)
Wow, the UX has come a long way, can't wait to try it.
What is MuseHub and how is Audacity related to it?
I hope app startup times have been improved, at some this regressed massively, from 0.5s to like 2s.
What do you recommend for destructive editing which is open-source ?
There video on their audio editor would have been much more interesting and widely useful if they instead showed how they made their beautiful video. There is much more combined video and audio editing going on than audio-editing alone and doing this well is difficult and time-consuming.
If anyone here has contributed to Audacity I just want to say thank you. I'm not a power user. I'm not in audio. However, over the years I have installed Audacity to do some audio things here and there. It has always been so useful.
The new editing features will be pretty useful for sound design.
Hopefully there will be a selfhostable implementation of their cloud counterpart someday? Maybe only a weekend of vibecoding away.
Surprised to see this upvoted to no. 1 on Hacker News in 2026. I used Audacity as recently as yesterday so I joined in and upvoted too. True that it has now displaced many commercial applications in the same niche.
Wasn't audacity taken over by a company sniffing for user data, some years ago?
I noted this down into a local .yml file back in 2021, when Muse Group took over and wanted to telemetry-sniff people. I didn't pay attention to audacity past that point.
Also, many accounts on hackernews act very suspiciously, with just raw promo as it if comes from an advertising account. I am noticing this increasingly, where people comment regular news with "this is great!!!!!". That makes no sense.
I used Audacity decades ago (2006-2010) but when I stopped buying PCs I always found there was noise on a Mac so I switched to logic.
I always thought audacity was great, and still prefer its workflow to slow tools or logic. I haven’t ever tried Reaper however.
What possesses people to not include a screenshot on pages like this?
I can now admit I have always hated using Audacity before, and these updates, just looking at the release videos, have finally won me over. Incredible makeover of a free software application. Good job all!
Finally looks great!
It's been many years since I used Audacity but the interface looks vastly improved.
But where is the AI pfft
I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38