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The FOSS tool for audio editing has a fresh coat of paint, and new features to boot
Audacity, a beloved open-source audio editing software tool, has just received a massive makeover.
For those unfamiliar with Audacity, it’s a 26-year-old piece of FOSS software that provides incredibly robust audio editing capabilities for the perfect price – $0 – making it ideal for independent musicians, garage bands, vinyl rippers, and college students who want to make a slowly, deliberately spoken foreign-language recording for a group project sound vaguely fluent - not that this vulture would know anything about that.
While an incredibly useful tool, Audacity’s interface has been stuck in the mid-aughts for a couple of decades now. That's changed with Thursday's release of Audacity 4.0.0. Not only has the interface been completely overhauled, but there are also a lot of under-the-hood changes as well.
The new UI was rebuilt on Qt and adds a Home screen for recent projects, plus configurable Workspaces. Audacity veterans will notice that the actual editing workflow looks different – much more like a modern piece of software than a relic of the Winamp days.
As part of that redesigned interface, a number of new features bring Audacity into the current age: Clips can be moved over one another, with the underlying portion replaced where they overlap, multiple clips can be selected at the same time, and clips can be grouped for moving as a single object. Audacity 4 also retains non-destructive trimming, meaning trimmed portions of a clip can be recovered simply by extending the clip back into the trimmed-out portion.
Audacity users have been crying out for a dedicated splitting tool, parent company Muse Group said in a press release, and that’s been added in version 4. Clip envelopes have also been added, which allow users to adjust the volume and add fades to tracks without altering the original recordings. All of Audacity’s built-in effects have been given an interface redesign as well.
In short, it’s a substantial rebuild, although Muse has tried not to alienate veterans, noting that "existing keyboard shortcuts remain available, projects created in Audacity 3 open normally, and the familiar layout of tracks and timeline has been preserved.”
Audacity 4, like all the versions that preceded it in the past 26 years, is remaining open source and free as well.
“We always like to thank the open source community who help our team make things better,” Muse’s head of communications Jack Sutton told The Register in an email. Sutton also tipped his hat to Martin Keary, former head of product for Muse Group, who was an instrumental part of building Audacity 4 and recently left the company.
Speaking of Keary, he published a nearly hour-long YouTube video in October defending the early alpha build of Audacity 4 when the FOSS audio editing world maligned the early build for turning Audacity into a full-fledged digital audio workstation (DAW) used to record, edit, and produce audio, instead of the editing tool it had long been. Keary insisted that wasn’t the case, and Sutton reiterated the point to us.
“DAW features like virtual instruments and MIDI support are not in Audacity 4,” the Muse Group spokesperson explained. “Some of the under-the-hood and structural changes do make it easier for our team to potentially build DAW-like features in future, but our current priority is on … speedy and efficient audio editing.”
Audacity 4 can be downloaded on GitHub and on MuseHub for those who use Muse’s other tools. ®
English (US) ·