this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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TL;DR this is a huge overhaul of the popular open-source audio editing app. The UI specifically has been the biggest overhaul, making it a lot more modern and friendly to use.

Hopefully, one day, GIMP will get some kind of update like this.

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[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 12 points 18 hours ago (18 children)

I kinda don't like that logo

I outright hate it. For all of Tantacrul's plugging on about design, he really dropped the ball, split his pants bending over for it.

Yeah the older logo may have looked dated, but I think what I would have done is get rid of the yellow glow behind the waveform and flattened a blue headset with a red wave between, not whatever liberal arts major bullshit this is.

[–] myyass@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The audacity you have to say that!

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)
[–] myyass@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
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[–] html5@programming.dev 0 points 8 hours ago
[–] joelfromaus@aussie.zone 9 points 19 hours ago (4 children)

About time! I was using an Adobe suite program for podcast editing years ago (Adobe didn’t get my money :P) and switched to Audacity.

I’d used Audacity fairly regularly for about 15 years and let me tell you; it was jarring how bad it was compared to modern software. I already see some UI/UX improvements that should make it much more user friendly.

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (5 children)

Back on in 2003 Adobe bought the freeware software called CoolEdit 2.0 and republished it as a paid product as Adobe Audition without changing a god damn thing.

CoolEdit was too good to be true. It's only fair that the developers got paid, but I just wish they didn't have to sell out to Adobe of all companies.

I hope this 2026 version of Audacity will finally be on level with what we had for free in year 2000.

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[–] Unleaded8163@fedia.io 117 points 1 day ago (8 children)

Does anyone actually like websites that mess with scrolling like that?

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago

I automatically assume their 'ui update' is bad based on their website alone.

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 60 points 1 day ago

I don't like it on desktop but goddamn, it sucks even more on mobile. I was swiping to scroll through the stupid horizontal menu and then when I got to the bottom of it, turns out I was scrolling so fast I basically teleported to the bottom of the page.

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[–] redshift@lemmy.zip 34 points 1 day ago (6 children)

I'll stick with 3.x, since they started using AI in 4.0 - or use Tenacity, of course.

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[–] Rose@lemmy.zip 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

GIMP already had a significant update not too long ago. There were UI improvements and things like effects for layers.

[–] popcar2@piefed.ca 8 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

There were UI improvements

Barely. It's the same old terrible UI and needs a complete overhaul.

[–] reka@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

GIMP's main issue is the UI issues the majority of people see is the idiosyncratic, well-loved UI it's most die hard fans would die defending. I swear Adobe astroturf resistance against it being improved...

[–] umbraroze@slrpnk.net 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, for most things, GIMP user interface is absolutely fine.

Most of my mild grumbles about GIMP are not really usability problems, rather just features that would be nice to have. (We got better layer groups now, yesss. Non-destructive plugins are finally within the viewing distance. Yay.) There is stuff that GIMP doesn't do but competing open source apps do, and while there's interoperability, it could always be better. (I hear GIMP is finally going to come up with a replacement for xcf files, hope they cooperate with Krita devs and blow the dust off the OpenRaster project.)

The only really aggravating GIMP usability thing is that exporting is very janky (would rather have one single unified export dialog with all the settings), but I assume that's just a thing because of the way GIMP file plugins have worked in the past.

[–] reka@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

My main complaint about GIMP is I have attempted to use it about 10 times in the last 20 years and I have never actually understood how to use it. I realise this arguably says more about me than GIMP but I also think I'm in the upper quartile of computer competence and I did an undergraduate module in computer graphics - surely this is it's #1 issue. But this is where I understand the paradigm of how its UX operates is beyond reproach.

[–] popcar2@piefed.ca 1 points 14 hours ago

Nah. Even someone who has never used another editing app would realize the UX is terrible, and it's harder to do basic things than it should be. There's too much stuff on screen and the UI looks terrible.

[–] FeelThePower@lemmy.dbzer0.com 47 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] nephew@lemmy.ca 30 points 1 day ago (3 children)

An Audacity fork without telemetry

[–] ace_garp@lemmy.world 22 points 23 hours ago

Also -->

"For discussions regarding all things Tenacity, you can head on over to our Lemmy community."

https://programming.dev/c/tenacity

PS. Glad to find this post, my first time hearing about tenacity fork!

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 16 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Also, their website actually works.

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[–] redshift@lemmy.zip 16 points 23 hours ago (2 children)
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[–] Lexam@lemmy.world 69 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Is audacity still bad and sending information to Russian servers or something?

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 86 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] Sparrow_1029@programming.dev 12 points 21 hours ago

Dang, clicked into the ToU changes in this MR:

Merge pull request 'Proposal Assembly 2026: ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions' (#1253) from gedankenstuecke/org:20260629-llm-proposal into main

Like that stance I think

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[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 44 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Surprisingly, the Internet seems to look mostly favourably on Audacity these days. I never really kept up with it at the time, but apparently all the allegedly heinous (mis)features were opt-in. (Further verification of this may be required.)

I can't tell if that's the result of a really good scrubbing of bad search results or whether they genuinely cleaned up their act.

Either way, Tenacity, the fork that came about as a result of the controversy, still exists, and apparently has themes to change the look just like Audacity is claiming to have done now, so if you're uncertain, that's always an option.

[–] MetaStatistical@lemmy.zip 42 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I got tired of Tenacity staying stagnant for months, and still having documentation link issues. Meanwhile, Audacity was actually making meaningful improvements.

After diving deeper in the nontroversy, and seeing their in-depth video explaining their design decisions, I concluded that they genuinely want to improve the software and aren't trying to fuck over the OSS community. So, I switched back when I dumped Windows and switched to Linux.

There's an extreme black and white view of these kinds of issues that crop up in the community that just pisses me off, and shoddy tech reporting doesn't help matters. This wasn't a "Oracle buys MySQL" situation, and the response didn't deserve a fork. But, hey, it's free software, and people can fork whatever they want.

[–] Rose@lemmy.zip 33 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It wasn't about "shoddy tech reporting". Why would a FOSS audio editing app need to know your country, any personal "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)", share it with a wide network of people and potential buyers, as well as their "main office in Russia"? There should be no telemetry of any sort. Any logs kept should be strictly local, which would allow users to send them to the support team voluntarily.

[–] Zagorath@quokk.au 8 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

It was to support the auto-update mechanism IIRC. It has to reach out to a server to do that, and the rest of the terms are just legal CYA for what could be possible based on that.

[–] Rose@lemmy.zip 7 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I don't see how an auto-update feature would need any of those things either. The request is made by the remote user to the Audacity update server. Of course, Linux servers typically keep logs, but that would be one line saying that in order for the app to check for updates or to be updated, an IP address and connection timestamp may end up on the update server.

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[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 1 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Why would I want an auto-update mechanism in the software? That's what my distro's package manager is for. And it doesn't care who I am or where I'm from. Nor has any other software I've encountered with such a useless-to-Linux-users mechanism demanded any information about me.

In short, that rationale is obvious nonsense. That may be why they claim they're doing it, but it doesn't hold up.

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[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

I remember when audacity was pure destructive editing, the mspaint of daws, like not quite notepad and sound recorder, but maybe wordpad. I think I still have a version of that old audacity installer somewhere....

I always kept/keep a full licensed daw for real projects, and then audacity for when I wanted to do a quick edit or recording and didn't want to boot up the big stuff.

Is it worth getting anymore? Or is it trying to compete with real daws? And if so, is it competitive on the same level?

[–] popcar2@piefed.ca 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Audacity isn't a fully fledged DAW, it's an audio editor that's mostly for recording, making quick edits, or fixing up audio. I don't think it's really possible to use it in music production yet.

[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 10 hours ago

So it's basically stop the same space? That's cool, I guess.

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[–] popcar2@piefed.ca 36 points 1 day ago

When you start the app for the first time it asks if you want to enable anonymous telemetry, but otherwise I don't think it sends anything.

[–] yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Maybe I'm being rohrschached but the first thing the new logo reminds me of is cock and balls. In an abstract way.

[–] bilb@lemmy.ml 6 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I don't quite see it if I'm being honest. I spend a lot of time looking at cocks, so maybe I'm calibrated differently.

[–] yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 14 hours ago

Like this:

Adjust the distance between the left and right ~~ball~~ earmuff and you get an (admittedly large and spiky) non-erect cock.

[–] BromSwolligans@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago

lol they've had the same basic interface since I was in high school 20 years ago. This is outstanding. Good for them. I almost never use Audacity anymore but I absolutely would use this if I had a reason to.

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