How we are building Audacity 4(youtube.com)

70 points by brudgers 18 hours ago | 13 comments

  • stevoski 41 minutes ago
    These videos by Tantacrul are sooooo good to watch, from the perspective of making product decisions for a software product. They are really well made, too
  • drzaiusx11 10 hours ago
    Is it still controlled by the Russian WSM Group? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728784
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    • brudgers 10 hours ago
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      • knowitnone3 7 hours ago
        GPL doesn't guarantee you security in any way, shape, or form nor is a privacy policy.
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        • Tantacrul 53 minutes ago
          You're right. Neither of these things are proof of honesty but to be clear, I would never work on a project that collects or misuses user data. This isn’t really a matter of “taking my word for it,” either. If anything like that were happening, it would be visible in the codebase, which anyone can look through (and many have). The app simply can’t transmit data without explicit instructions in the code.

          Audacity does not store any personal information of any kind, and never did.

        • brudgers 6 hours ago
          Sure and I agree.

          However Reddit is sometimes a source of sensational misunderstanding, fear, uncertainty, doubt and misinformation.

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    • asddubs 10 hours ago
      The video addresses this and claims it's not.
  • kennyadam 8 hours ago
    I don’t know when it happened, but earlier in the week a non-tech member of staff, who was trying to install Audacity, called me really confused because it was asking about installing and then saving to some sort of cloud storage that was being pushed during the installation process. I personally haven’t used Audacity for a couple of years, so the cloud storage stuff added in 2024 is new to me showing up during install. It appeared again in the choice of save locations even after rejecting it during install and I have no interest in someone calling me in two years asking where their files are after the cloud storage shuts down or gets paywalled. For 95% of casual users looking to just split/combine/trim/etc some basic audio files, I’m just gonna tell them to use Ocenaudio.
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    • brudgers 7 hours ago
      I think Musehub.com is a sister project within Muse Group that helps mitigate the cost of paying professional developers to work on Audacity and MuseScore.

      In the case of Muse Score it also provides a marketplace for third parties.

      I don’t use it but I can see why it exists…ordinary folks expect cloud services these days. And if I had a different use case, it would help me get stuff done.

      But for what it’s worth with Audacity I don’t see it pop up as a location on my computer.

  • n0ot 11 hours ago
    I know accessibility for low vision users was mentioned, but I wonder, with all these changes, whether version 4 will be accessible to screen reader users, and if so, whether any major features will nevertheless remain inaccessible.
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    • Tantacrul 58 minutes ago
      We're using the framework my team on MuseScore Studio created for the UI in Audacity. This allows us to port over the significant amount of screen reader support we built over there too.

      We'll need to spend time making sure it's applying correctly to every corner of the app - but when it's done, the app will be far more broadly supported than V3.

    • brudgers 10 hours ago
      I would guess accessibility will be similar to the current version of MuseScore since the same company (Muse Group) is leading both open source projects. So maybe look at MuseScore.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_Group