How we are building Audacity 4 | Hacker News Reader

How we are building Audacity 4

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159 pointsbrudgers32 comments

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

Is it still controlled by the Russian WSM Group? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728784

The video addresses this and claims it's not.

The code is GPL.

https://github.com/audacity/audacity

The application privacy policy is here

https://www.audacityteam.org/desktop-privacy-notice/

GPL doesn't guarantee you security in any way, shape, or form nor is a privacy policy.

Sure and I agree.

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

Who said anything about reddit?

The claim of Russian involvement was a link to HN comments on a link to a Reddit thread.

It’s amazing how much you are avoiding the question.

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.

yeah I think audacity just got dinged by its association with musescore, but its probably a good idea to watch out who you associate with. I like audacity but I try to stick with the earliest version that still runs, my current version is like 5 years old or something and it does what I need.

The author of the comment to which you responded is head of both Musescore and Audacity.

They also made the fine video.

He's probably aware of all the issues then, it'd thus be ok to just hide my comment, I don't mind. I will say that everytime I read about the musescore/audacity/guitar-whatever-it-is stuff it makes me want to find an earlier version of audacity, I might run out of versions at some point haha

and how are you tied to these groups with their "fine video"

I posted the fine link.

And use the fine software.

It's not quite that simple. While the codebase is open source, the website could provide binaries that were not built from the open source code (e.g by patching to add tracking). So it is necessary to trust Muse Group if you're installing from the recommended source (which the vast majority of users will be doing).

Even if there is no tracking at the moment, there is always the worry that Muse Group will "go bad" and start adding tracking, or make the later versions closed-source, etc. One could argue that it's still better than a fully closed source company - sure - but what happens to Audacity/MuseScore then?

Reliance on a single company developing code has huge benefits: as discussed in this video, the centralisation really helped with vision and planning; but it does make me slightly uncomfortable. The development is no longer "open", in the sense of community driven. The application now has a different goal (to make money for Muse Group), not necessarily aligned with what users want/need. It cuts to the core of what we actually want from free software - lack of profit motive? transparency? Of what exactly?

It cuts to the core of what we actually want from free software

Mostly people want free as in beer and actual users of Audacity use Audacity because they want to process audio.

it does make me slightly uncomfortable

Then you have a choice to make. There are many other audio software packages with a variety of tradeoffs to choose from because everything is not for everyone.

make money for Muse Group

To me the strategy appears to be that strengthening the two open source projects (MuseScore and Audacity) enhances their many commercial offerings…for example a stronger MuseScore is better for Hal Leonard Publishing particularly in light of the demise of Finale and a better Audacity code base is a good way to develop the audio code that other Muse Group products need anyway.

And for what my pure speculation is worth, the purchase of the trademarks for Audacity and MuseScore could rationally contain conditions underwhich Muse Group would have to sell those trademarks back to the original owners.

But even absent such conditions of sale, the original trademark owners likely trusted Muse Group to do the right thing (and if the sale was just about money, then the original trademark owners were already mercenary themselves and so whatever trust you previously had was already misplaced).

While the codebase is open source, the website could provide binaries that were not built from the open source code (e.g by patching to add tracking).

That is a violation of GPL.

Whether it’s a violation of GPL or not doesn’t have anything to do with the matter in question.

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

That's a claim we'll never truly know. Also, one auto-update will ruin your day.

The privacy policy now reads For the purposes of this Notice, MuseCY SM Ltd., a Cyprus company with an address at Spyrou Kyprianou, 84, 4004, Limassol, Cyprus (“Audacity Team“, “us“, “we“, or “our“) acts as the data controller for the personal information that is collected via the App and through the use of the App, as further outlined in section 2 (“personal information”). As a data controller, the Audacity Team makes sure that any processing of your personal information complies with applicable data protection law, and specifically with the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”).

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.

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

Nice update — hope it rolls out smoothly.

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.

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.

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.

Yes. And ?

A lot of projects propose cloud storage without trying to force it on you. More the How than the What which is questionable here.

Like I said for many people, it is a benefit not a detriment.

Add in all the people who just don’t care and there is only a relative handful of people who are bothered.

Now filter out the people who don’t use the software from that relative handful and there’s an actual handful of users who might have to find something else because everything isn’t for everyone.

There were some forks of the original at the time that are still simple like https://tenacityaudio.org/ but I'm not sure how healthy any of them are.

The video mentions being able to move from wxWidgets to Qt.

As someone who's never worked with either (only web UIs), I thought this would be a good chance to understand: why is wx bad, what makes Qt good?

I don’t think it is good/bad.

More, what is better for this specific project at this point in time given the objectives…it’s just an engineering judgement.

WXwidgits got Audacity through twenty odd years of intense development and helped millions of users.

having worked with wxwidgets only a tiny bit, things simply don't look or even work the same across operating systems with wxwidgets. It tries to use native widgets wherever possible, but that also means things behave slightly differently across systems, and if the toolkit doesn't provide a matching widget, it sometimes just uses the next best thing. All this also makes it rather hard to style things in a way that looks good. It's good for simple applications but you run into the limitations quickly if you actually try to use it cross-platform in my limited experience.

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