2mo ago

Well, it IS ridiculous

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reminder that Audacity has been bought out by an investor and now has mandatory data collection and privacy violations and cannot be trusted. Delete it and use Tenacity audio, a FOSS fork
- This is news to me, thank you
  
  Welcome! If you want to read about it here you can, they supposedly backpedaled and "it's not that bad" but there is zero trust in those private owners.
  
  I remember reading some articles saying that they backtracked.
  I can't judge how careful the people saying "Audacity is evil" are regarding privacy. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested in your thoughts.
  MuseScore is owned by the same company, Firefox is worse (as the article mentions)... Do you not use either of these? Do you use one of these but not Audacity? If the second one applies to someone, what would be the reason? As a matter of principle? Something else?
  (I mean, I don't know of a FOSS alternative to MuseScore.)
- According to the arch wiki: Audacity #Tenacity_fork
  In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. As an alternative tenacity was forked by a group of volunteers as open-source software.
  Doesn't sound like they actually went through with it?
  
  Doesn’t sound like they actually went through with it?
  They did not. I use Audacity regularly on more than one platform. It collects no data from me. It also hasn't received an update in years, but still does exactly what it needs to do, and does it well.
  That said, I hadn't heard of Tenacity until this thread, and it looks like I shall be migrating over to that anyway. Better safe than sorry.
  
  It also hasn’t received an update in years
  Wherever you've been using it from likely hasn't been official then because Audacity got it's most recent update 3 days ago. Muse group is still working on it but I don't trust them.
  
  Hmm. You are correct. On both my Windows and Linux machines, I am on Audacity 2.4.2. I've been using it for years, now. I never changed my sources, and it never stopped working. Haha!
  
  And honestly, that's perfectly OK! There's nothing wrong with those older releases, they just might not quite have the same later feature sets but 90% of people don't even need those.
  
  Yeah, and I tried Tenacity, and it doesn't want to work at all. Guess I'm sticking with old Audacity.
- thank you for the reminder.
- Is nothing scared.
  
  I’m scared, but nothing is sacred..yeah
  
  Haha whoops. I'm leaving it.
- Loved seeing that Codeberg link.
- now has mandatory data collection
  What sort of data collection?
  
  None actually happened, and they just wanted to track which features were actually used to be able to see how/where to focus their efforts in audacity.
- So sad the development is not active. I hope it gets more attention
  
  I think of it as finished software. It's the MS Paint or Notepad for sound. No development necessary.
  The only reason I've used it is because Adobe bought CoolEdit and started "developing" it, a.k.a.: Turned it into paid bloatware and changed the name to Audition. So, I found Audacity which is free, small, to the point and quick to use.
  If you do need more features you'd probably be better off switching to something else in the first place.

47 comments