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Comment by hrdwdmrbl | Hacker News Reader

A cheap way to do it is to use Nativefier. It's not perfect but it's like a 80% solution.

I think this was tongue-in-cheek. Nobody would actually want to take a native C/C++ Audacity, port it to WASM, and then wrap it in Electron to make it a "desktop app" again.

It would give you safety properties that native Audacity doesn't have. It would also make distribution much easier.

> It would give you safety properties that native Audacity doesn't have. It would also make distribution much easier.

Has Audacity ever had safety issues in the past?

Because it sounds like you'll be going to a lot of effort to prevent a problem that had never surfaced in over a decade of use.

Not the sort of safety issues I think you mean, but there have been some rather questionable behaviours from the current owners in the last year or so. A quick search for Audacity here or elsewhere will find the details.

I'll save everyone the quick search. They added really basic opt-in telemetry, and then removed it after an out-of-proportion outcry.

i dont understand privacy maniacs. have telemetry in from the start, nobody bats an eye. add it later, everyone freaks.

Simple, privacy "maniacs" do not install something with telemetry integrated by default.

So of course they freak, when it is suddenly creeping in, in something they trusted.

especially if it's opt-in (which is provable since the project is entirely open-source) -- can people simply _not_ opt-in if they disagree with telemetry?

In the first case, intentions are clear from the start, so user trust can be built.

In the second case, intentions have been hidden or they have changed, which obviously erodes user trust.

Good write-up here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/no-open-source-audac...

It wasn’t clear it was opt-in (although maybe the code was clear?).

Either way, adding telemetry (especially to open source) is obviously going to cause a ruckus, so they obviously mishandled the situation.

Audacity segfaults all the time when I use it. Don’t make it sound like it is more stable than it really is. Security bugs are a subset of bugs, of which Audacity has many.

also it would let you have a common target (wasm) for plugins so it doesn't matter if you're running on ARM/x86

On the M1 Mac I actually measured lower CPU usage during audio playback on WASM compared to the native desktop version which uses Rosetta. I'm not sure if the slowness is due to Rosetta or a performance bug on the Mac port.

Supposedly[1], Audacity 3.2.0 will be available as an M1 native app.

Guess we’ll see then :)

[1]: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=114242&s...

Niche hardware popular in the US alone? Mild shock.

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