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An audacity fork. Reason for forking described at https://tenacityaudio.org/docs/_content/Introduction_and_Mot... . Their own summary:

> at the primary reasons were attempts at adding telemetry and a new desktop privacy policy [by the new audacity maintainers]

Previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835200

So, 4 years since the initial forks and 2 years since the Audacium merge, how Tenacity (basically Tenacity&Saucedacity&Audacium) compares to Audacity?

After its inception, Tenacity unfortunately tackled an irrelevant, yet opinionated part of development first: The build system, together with any internal variables saying "audacity" getting replaced with "tenacity". As such, a lot of the work that's gone into it don't manifest to users, and merging any upstream changes takes needlessly long. As a result of this, Tenacity fell behind upstream a lot, being stuck somewhere around Audacity 3.1 while Audacity already was around 3.7. Last month, mercifully, Tenacity got rebased onto Audacity 3.7: https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity/pulls/527 (a +261299 -395037 diff!)

As far as user-facing changes go, it's some new themes, a different compressor, keeping features visible which upstream has hidden by default, MKA support without FFmpeg, as well as support for some more niche systems (Haiku, BSD). All of this is in some stages of ongoing; Tenacity 1.4 alpha 1 got released a few weeks ago, and while that does include the rebase, it hasn't ported back all of the changes which were made before the rebase.

Noteworthy: Most of the development is being contributed by one person, Avery King.

As of right now, I'd recommend Audacity 3.7.x over Tenacity, as Audacity 3.x has been in maintenance mode pretty much since 3.6, while Tenacity is currently finding its footing again. Disabling update checking is easy enough anyway.

In the future though, it appears that Tenacity is going to keep alive legacy Audacity for legacy systems while Audacity 4 is on the way of adding more DAW features and dropping support for older systems. Definitely a worthwhile role to inherit.

(disclaimer: I was a designer for Audacity)

The things that are happening to Audacity 4 have made me ponder doing the opposite: taking Ardour and stripping it down to make an audio file editor ...

A waveeditor inside a DAW is very helpful anyway; it's the place where you can chop up source files to become loops, and where you can throw in stretch markers to conform fluctuating tempo in the source to your beat. And once you have that going, there's very little in the way of having a template which only shows you that.

In Audacity, our goal is to keep it extremely approachable for beginners, so for us the idea of having one view of a clip in context of the project and a different view in which you only see the clip is something we'd rather not do. A wave editor window or panel separate from the main project timeline is however the industry standard, and as such it might be exactly the sort of feature which would be very at home in Ardour.

> A wave editor window or panel separate from the main project timeline is however the industry standard, and as such it might be exactly the sort of feature which would be very at home in Ardour.

Already landing in Ardour 9. However, at present, since our editing is always non-destructive, you can't do much there other than move start/end markers. We'll likely be doing more work on variable realtime time stretching in the march towards v10, and that will likely be accessible from both the main timeline and dedicated editors (but we'll see).

And yeah, Ardour's current goal is much more focused on being a powerful tool for people who do this stuff a lot, but there are a variety of arguments that support the idea that we need to do something/more to support beginners. We'll see about that too.

Hello! Indeed, I'm most the one pushing all this forward, and I keep planning to do this because I find it fun! I will take breaks occasionally, but I can assure anyone that I'll still be around. I have plenty of ideas regarding it too.

I do want to mention the build system part though: indeed, there are trade offs of Tenacity's build system vs Audacity's build system. However, on Windows (and hopefully Mac soon), it does allow us to ship newer versions of our dependencies, such as wxWidgets, which means we can do some neat little things. For example, the latest development nightly version of Tenacity (which you can download at https://tenacityaudio.org/nightly) supports Windows dark mode simply because wxWidgets now has support for it. Alas, it's an undocumented features on Windows that can break at any time, but for now, it works, and it's a nice little thing to have. It will especially help when we implement dynamic theming support (which I have figured out how to adapt to light/dark mode changes via wxWidgets). Of course, merging upstream changes can be very long, but we can also work around that. (Sometimes, we are the upstream too, especially with libmad and libid3tag ;). Either way, I find one benefit of it is allowing us to easily use newer dependencies that enable us to use newer features, and while this doesn't matter a whole lot on systems like Linux, *BSD, Haiku, etc., it does help with systems like Windows and (hopefully soon) macOS. (Currently, you can install Tenacity via MacPorts).

Also, I wouldn't necessarily say that work on the build system lead to us falling behind in development necessarily. I'd say that was due to the hiatus we had. Unfortunately, maintainer burnout can happen, and it doesn't help that Tenacity's start had a bit of its own controversy either with naming. At this point, that seems to be mostly behind us. From what I've seen anyways, I don't see many people mention it at all, but I could be wrong.

Regarding the rebase, yes, not everything's been ported back. In fact, for 1.4 alpha 1, I actually intentionally left out one thing: our own themes. I decided I was done dealing with the theme system, so I decided I would go about rewriting it. I had this planned for several years at this point, and there was already some code to experiment with before the rebase. If not for user themes, then it's certainly for the maintenance part of it, as themes should be easier to work with afterwards. (If anyone is interested in what the new theme system would have to offer, then I'd be glad to discuss it! :D)

Finally, would it be appropriate to say we're going to keep legacy Audacity alive "for legacy systems"? Maybe the "legacy Audacity" part, but not "legacy systems". If anything, I think it's safe to say that Tenacity on Linux requires a distribution like Debian 12 or later (including its derivatives). Sure, Debian 12 might be a bit older at this point, but I wouldn't necessary call it "legacy" just yet right now. Do we aim to support older distributions as time goes along? As long as it's reasonable. The same goes with Windows and macOS. In fact, Tenacity requires macOS 10.15 and has for some time. I want to increase the minimum version some time later, at least to macOS 11 if not later, but I'll likely give (what I think should be) plenty of time before that happens.

I think time will have to tell where this all goes. After all, I think there's some purpose for Tenacity to exist considering we've already had over 3,000 downloads for the 64-bit Windows installer for 1.4 alpha 1 alone. It might not be much compared to Audacity, and I think it pales in comparison to Audacity's popularity. To me, however, even 3,000 downloads is quite a lot, and it means something to me. There's also someone looking to package Tenacity for FreeBSD, albeit it appears to be the 1.4 alpha 1 version (which I would prefer the latest stable version for clear reasons). Yes, it's, like you said, a "more niche" system, but it's interest nonetheless.

P.S. I welcome any contributions from any contributors, especially those packaging Tenacity. We don't require any CLA, just the Developer Certificate of Origin (the same one the Linux kernel uses), and neither do we use AI to review contributions ;)

I've been using both lately. Last I checked, Tenacity was missing some of Audacity's best new features such as real-time effects. Also, Tenacity crashes constantly, whereas Audacity only crashes a lot (on my Thinkpad running Fedora).

Well, technically the reason for the fork was the implanted backdoor that was executing a binary coming from Muse groups server, hidden as telemetry and an update check. It's not a well built backdoor and the code is easy to spot, as there's not a lot of other http related code in audacity itself.

edit: Check the au3/src/update/UpdateManager.cpp, they're still not hiding this better after all that happened, lol.

[1] https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/8d6e45a9756e700b7f...

Can you point out the specific issue here? At a glance it looks like a fairly normal self-update patching process

I mean, you already are "executing a binary coming from Muse groups server" if you downloaded Audacity from their website. How is an auto update mechanism a backdoor? You have to accept a modal for it to run the downloaded binary.

I guess it could be improved by using and verifying signatures, but it seems pretty on point for a standard windows software auto update feature

You are aware that VLC, LibreOffice and many other FOSS apps have an update checker?

The problem is not the update check itself, but what the server in Moscow returns. That's the whole point and the reason of me mentioning it.

There is no server in Moscow, and I don't think there ever was. Muse Group left their original office in Kaliningrad for Cyprus pretty much the second the war started, and at this point has no offices or employees left in Russia. The servers always have been bog-standard cloud things, so Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, aws via Netlify and such.

Not good to hear they're based in Moscow, but that ship has presumably already sailed and sunk if you're running the auto-update code in an existing Audacity installation.

What other concerns besides national origin exist with this code? Nothing seems to qualify as a "back door," certainly.

Set the system language and timezone, the IP and originating ASN, to areas where APT28/APT29 is having active malware campaigns and see whether you'll receive a sample. Pretty simple.

The real question is whether they have changed their C2 behaviors since Valentine's day in 2023, and whether or not the AstraL1nvx botnet operator images are still available publicly.

please provide any sort of source that Audacity is, or ever has been, distributing malware.

He has none and has been trying to depict Audacity as a Russian malware vector for over a year now, but without providing any source.

Technically it's been over 4 years

Sneed

To be fair, I'm not sure if that's really an accurate description of it.

Either way, just wanted to say hi! :D

You are not the one who lost their loved ones over this, we are way past that point of assumed innocence.

There's a reason for why I am doing what I am doing.

If it has truly escalated to that point, then I certainly cannot speak further. You are right in that I have been fortunate enough not to lose anyone over such a matter. I do feel sorry for your loss, however, because no one deserves to lose a loved one like that.

Audacity had a 5 year plan on removing technical debt and overhauling the UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38 (1 hour long video)

Will this be merged into Tenacity or are they going further apart?

that's a beautiful and very educational video. Basically how to listen user and how to implement feedback around user feedback.

I mean tantacrul's videos are generally super educational to begin with but I really liked this one tbh. Wish he could do this full time and had more frequent videos.

the only thing that I didn't liked the logo. I mean bleh. i hope they'll do something more nice to look at. that's my only complaint lol.

the logo on their website has been much improved imo: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6511efa00919fb9000588f9a/...

They have a new logo for the new release that is quite ugly in my opinion. I think that one is meant here.

Listenable at 2x, so only a 26 minute video! (I highly recommend trying more than 2x for premium users, and letting your brain get used to it before poopooing it.)

If you're curious about the legacy link being a 404, the correct link seems to be that: https://tenacityaudio.org/legacy/legacy.html

(found sniffing around https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacityaudio.org , this 404 was reported on IRC)

I like this more https://www.ocenaudio.com/features

I love OcenAudio, it's SoundForge for the new millennium =)

It is, however, not the same type of app. OcenAudio is a wave editor, so only one file at a time. Audacity is multitrack, and has a project structure much like a DAW without the MIDI stuff.

Not open source, as far as I can see.

I dropped audacity because of the audacious cloud crap in an application I view as Notepad for wav files

Tenacity has been pretty nice

I'm having difficulty building it on Artix (an arch derivative).

    [ 63%] Linking CXX executable ../RelWithDebInfo/tenacity
    /usr/bin/ld: /tmp/lto-llvm-3894d5.o:   (.data.rel.ro._ZTI21ListNavigationEnabledI8wxWindowE[_ZTI21ListNavigationEnabledI8wxWindowE]+0x10): undefined reference   to `typeinfo for wxNavigationEnabled<wxWindow>'

I have nothing to tenacity or artix, but my top search result gave me this link:

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/4614#issuecommen...

Looks similar and kind of makes sense with tenacity using the audacity 3 UI ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thank you!

It seems like Tenacity is getting more attention in recent days. Why that is, I'm not sure, but it's great to see it getting more traction! (I say this as a current maintainer! :D)

In recent times, Tenacity 1.4 alpha 1 was released! This is the culmination of a months-long rebase effort off Audacity 3.7.5, bringing features like realtime effects, non-destructive pitch shifting and stretching, beats and bars support, and plenty of others. Of course, there's no telemetry either, including cloud integration too.

Keep in mind that this is an alpha release, so we're still working on the final 1.4 release and are still a good deal away from it. For example, one of the most notable things missing at the moment are our themes, but those will return in 1.4 alpha 2 as I'm working on a brand new theme system to address the limitations of the current theme system. I intentionally did not reimplement our themes again because I was tired of dealing with the theme system we inherited, and this has been in the work for several years now. We should be close to fruition, but I'm performing some refactoring first before I continue on :)

Meanwhile, we're also working on an unplanned 1.3.5 release. It was originally intended to be a rebuild of 1.3.4 (which I'll explain when 1.3.5 is released), but it's going to include a fix for a spectrogram crash, Windows dark mode support, fixes for recent compilers, and a new Windows on ARM build! I also plan to get macOS builds back again, but I don't have a Mac to test things on. I know macOS builds are currently packaged incorrectly, and I'm currently trying to figure that out. If anyone wants to test out the latest 1.3.5 builds, you can here: https://nightly.link/tenacityteam/tenacity/workflows/cmake_b.... All in all, you can think of 1.3.5 as, at this point, having a few 1.4 alpha 1 backports, kind of like how 1.3.4 had a few pre-rebase 1.4 backports.

Anyways, I'm glad to see some interest in Tenacity. If anyone wants to contribute, feel free to come over to https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity and contribute in anyway you can! We also have a manual that needs to be (re)written (for 1.4) here: https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity-manual. Finally, you can also contribute to our Weblate here: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/tenacity. However you contribute, we will wholeheartedly accept it! Thanks in advance too! :D

For something more simplistic, there is also kwave: https://apps.kde.org/kwave/

Will have to try this out. I have yet to find a reason to not just continue to use the old version 2.x audacity from the pre-telemetry days. I just need simple post-production tools after rendering out of my DAW and the old audacity does the trick.

This is interesting because it's based on audacity, but Audacity is also going through a more thorough rewrite.

Does anyone see multitrack recording happening well in-browser?

Has anyone tried BandLab? Aside from the social slop and recent aggressive advertising, their recording app is super impressive, glitch free, low latency, easy to use and sounds great.

Or will this always be the domain of installable software?

Someone ported Audacity to the web. https://wavacity.com/

Serious question: Why would it be preferable to have something like this in the browser? The thought of having to keep track of a browser tab that you might accidentally close and lose all your work doesn't sound great.

I would like to see something like this in the Web simply to allow for collaboration.

I would love to see a DAW where randos upload just a track—maybe a drum track. Other's can "create a branch" where they jam along: add a bass track. And let the jamming, branching, songwriting commence.

Why does that require the web? Networked collaboration integration already exists in mainstream DAWs without all the downsides of forcing things into a web browser

Everyone has a browser, not everyone has a DAW, and even fewer people have the same DAW.

Doing this in a browser is ridiculously inefficient.

But if you just want a limited-track scratchpad for virtual jamming, it's the most accessible option.

The bigger, broader problem is that "virtual jamming" just doesn't seem to have taken off the way some folks thought it would.

It's not a useless thing to be able to do, but there are few people who seem to want it at the center of their music-making activity. At least that is the way it seems to me. It initially appeared to be an immensely cool new capability, and in many ways it really is. It just isn't a thing that many people want to do.

I've seen a few products that are in essence, "virtual jamming" but they're not marketed like that. For example a bunch of live sound mixers come with an iOS app for live monitoring that you can use to feed monitor mixes straight to musicians' devices. Super useful if you have an iPad controlling Mainstage, a monitor mix, and sheet music. Another that's less obvious are live transcription/hearing assistance where you want to use your phone to tap into the output of the recording console's mix, or a translation/audio description mix.

That's a completely different concept from "virtual jamming", which requires moving audio back and forth over a WAN.

The sort of live sound mixers you're describing just send control signals between the pad and the mixer, no audio flows to or from the pad.

There are monitoring apps that do send audio to the device. I'm not talking about mix control apps. These are wireless replacements for dedicated monitor mixes that run over WiFi.

Right, but those are entirely different from the control protocols used between the pad and the mixer ...

... and it is still different from virtual jamming, which more or less definitionally requires a WAN. If you're all within wifi range of the mixer, you're actually jamming :)

This is easy to fix with local storage. You reopen the tab and you're right where you left it. Unfortunately the companies see it as an opportunity to lock users in with cloud saving.

The allure is that the web is the most open, most stable and the most cross-device platform we have. Almost anything that was made for web still works today, with Flash and Java applets being the two big exceptions. Following the Lindy effect the self-contained web apps of today will still be operational far into the future.

Contrast this with Android's pathetic record of constantly breaking backward compatibility and restricting what software the users can even run on their devices.

How is the web stable? Any server can change the app you're working on without you being able to do anything. Tons of the old web is broken or gone.

Compare that to a win32 desktop app that will almost certainly keep working indefinitely without any changes. Plus you can use proper files for storage.

I was talking about web as technology stack. The tech is battle proven and capable. I had great success in getting some ancient web projects to run locally, less luck with Windows projects and even less with Linux sources.

You are right that by the nature of web the long term stability is not guaranteed. The ecosystem could do more to encourage decoupling and graceful degradation. About 95% of modern web is competing in sharing your data to even more "parties with legitimate interest".

I've never recorded with BandLab, but used it a lot for playback, and for a beginner, it's really good and very easy to use.

With regards to recording - I'm curious how this would work on a scale like 16 ins at a time. Dumping bits from the interface to disk as uncompressed .wav is trivial, on the browser I'm not sure how storage works. Would it have to upload to the cloud immediately?

While Audacity is the app that I always have on every platform, UI is not so good. That shouldn't be hard to remake in raylib.

Audacity 4 is getting a completely new UI.

I didn't know it was still maintained. Just gave it a try on this laptop with Manjaro Linux + XFCE and noticed it both messes with the desktop panel toolbar making it rearrange and flash repeatedly for some seconds while loading and also when changing preferences, then doesn't correctly fit fonts into the dropdown lists in all toolbars. It appears to me it doesn't take into account that the list elements add a bigger empty space around fonts compared for example to buttons, so it considers them shorter and they're partially cut out. I don't have a GH account to properly report this.

From the Development section > The upstream development repository is found on Codeberg. We maintain a GitHub mirror for accessibility and CI purposes, but pull requests are ignored.