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Whatever Happened to Audacity?
(piped.video)
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Basically, they were bought out by MuseGroup. MuseGroup tried to add telemetry and some bad TOS stuff. It all got reversed.
A great example of why I'd just about always prefer to get software packaged by my distro (Debian) over "straight from the developer" methods (including pip, npm, flatpak, etc.). I remember hearing about this and being like "Oh, that's bad, but it's not going to affect me."
So Audacity is fine to use (again)?
The version you want to use is Tenacity. It seems good, but I haven't done extensive reading on it.
Yes tenacity is a community fork that happened during the hubbub with the musescore takeover and telemetry additions and doesn't have any of it.
It also has a couple of quality-of-life additions and a few new features but nothing specifically different as of yet. Mostly, it's a good community-lead fork that has some momentum behind it - since it also unifies the developers behind 2-3 protest forks that happened at the same time and I think that's generally (if not a safe bet) a good thing to support.
I hope they will fork MuseScore too. I really don't like the direction in which that company is going...
Is it actually actively being developed? I tried to jump on board when I heard the drama, but it sounded like the Tenacity team was still trying to get their shit together.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
Good thing I never update it and missed all this. I had no idea.
for real. I think I have a 5 year old version I've been using for ... well, I reckon I been usin it for goin on five years now, then
Wait, THAT was the issue? (I thought it was another program that got sold, and the new owner bundled it with malware or something.) Is there something wrong with MuseGroup? I've been using MuseScore for ages.
The FOSS community really HATE tracking and telemetry. For example, google get a lot of flak recently for attempting to add telemetry to golang compiler and had to make it opt-in (instead of opt-out) as a compromise.
I really understand this as a starting position, but it can definitely be taken too far. I feel like the details matter a lot.
A few years ago there was a big dust up in the Julia community when they wanted to add a small amount of telemetry to the package servers - basically the plan was to identify real users from things like CI runs, and to be able to identify the number of unique users , which matters a lot, especially for grant writing (and a lot of academics use Julia, so this would be a boon to the ecosystem).
The core devs were super up front about it, offered easy opt-out, and even were receptive to a plan that would switch from unique identifiers for downloaders to some scheme that would give an accurate count without the ability to trace a particular download to a particular user, but a couple of prominent members of the community were incensed.