A few years back Audacity got acquired by a commercial entity. They then proceeded to cause some controversy regarding user privacy.
I think they walked back some of them, and changed the installer to allow disabling the data collection; but by that time, a few forks have started popping up. Tenacity seems to be what many people eventually settle on.
God out of all the software I’ve used over the years, to see Audacity go to hell like that is sad. I was not expecting that. And to think once upon a time, i replaced a little program called Cooledit Pro (which was bought by Adobe if I recall), with Audacity.
Enshitification by owners of Audacity including telemetry. They eventually backed down, but that was after Tenacity forked off it and people started using and improving it.
The sad reality of audio software has been that usually the paid commercial software is better and more reliable. I’ve used Audacity alot for work, and it gets it the job done, but tools like iZotope RX are light years beyond in features and UI/UX.
Don’t know if you can call this “enshittification” as that implies it got progressively worse. It was bought out by a corporation and immediately turned to shit while also being neglected.
the trademark got bought. it’s still FLOSS, and they pledged to keep it that way, for whatever that’s worth. code can’t be retroactively un-gpled, so if they did decide to close it down they couldn’t just take it offline, only do new development in private. the big fishy thing was that they added a CLA to their repo, which only affects developers. as an end-user you’re fine.
also, the “crap” was a draft proposal of opt-in telemetry, which was subsequently scrapped. the company in question is based in the EU, anyway, so they would have to abide by the gdpr for any collected information.
What’s the Audacity/Tenacity deal?
A few years back Audacity got acquired by a commercial entity. They then proceeded to cause some controversy regarding user privacy.
I think they walked back some of them, and changed the installer to allow disabling the data collection; but by that time, a few forks have started popping up. Tenacity seems to be what many people eventually settle on.
God out of all the software I’ve used over the years, to see Audacity go to hell like that is sad. I was not expecting that. And to think once upon a time, i replaced a little program called Cooledit Pro (which was bought by Adobe if I recall), with Audacity.
Enshitification by owners of Audacity including telemetry. They eventually backed down, but that was after Tenacity forked off it and people started using and improving it.
What state is tenacity in these days?
Works great for me
Same. Although I only use it for very basic things. Honestly I mostly have switched to Davinci’s Fairlight, which is built into Resolve.
I can’t press the record button without it crashing and it fails to see half of my audio inputs, so I’d say not great.
The sad reality of audio software has been that usually the paid commercial software is better and more reliable. I’ve used Audacity alot for work, and it gets it the job done, but tools like iZotope RX are light years beyond in features and UI/UX.
Don’t know if you can call this “enshittification” as that implies it got progressively worse. It was bought out by a corporation and immediately turned to shit while also being neglected.
Apparently Audacity has been bougth by a company which subsequently did crap with it. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/s9isqj/help_tenacity_a_fork_of_audacity_after_its/
Not sure how good Tenacity currently is
the trademark got bought. it’s still FLOSS, and they pledged to keep it that way, for whatever that’s worth. code can’t be retroactively un-gpled, so if they did decide to close it down they couldn’t just take it offline, only do new development in private. the big fishy thing was that they added a CLA to their repo, which only affects developers. as an end-user you’re fine.
also, the “crap” was a draft proposal of opt-in telemetry, which was subsequently scrapped. the company in question is based in the EU, anyway, so they would have to abide by the gdpr for any collected information.
the hackaday series on this is probably the best summary.