Audacity is a free, open source, and cross-platform audio and music editor.
Free • Open Source
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What is Audacity?
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records, edit sound files, change the speed or pitch of a recording and much more.
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Warning
After being bought by Muse Group in April 2021, Audacity has changed its privacy policy and may collect "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)". It's now considered as a spyware by many.
• Top positive commentover 5 years ago • 0 replies
I've used Audacity for a long long time, everything from editing early music attempts, to podcasts, to interview audio. It's definitely not the most powerful software in the world, but for the price of free, it does plenty.
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filippogr
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• Top positive comment8 months ago • 0 replies
Good alternative to Adobe Audition. It's complete and open-source.
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• Top negative comment3 months ago • 4 replies
According to fosspost.org Audacity has been acquired by an organization called MUSE, which has updated the privacy policy (PP) allowing for them to gather data, send it back to their servers, and do so in a way that makes you identifiable. Audacity reserves the right to share your data with staff, "any competent law enforcement body, government agency, court or third party", their auditors and legal representatives, and their potential buyers (PP.4.x). Your IP will be stored unhashed for a day (PP.6.1). They may store personal data (PP.6.2). Your data may be transferred across servers in Russia, the US, and the EEA (PP.7.1)
DO NOT USE.
SV1987
I will use the old version. From behind a firewall it can't send any data anyway.
Reply written 3 months ago
durhambell
Agreed, firewall should stop it. Still, it's dodgy. Would like to have time to check the source code and see how this data collection is implemented. Apparently the "Muse Group" is headquartered in Shanghai...soooooooo...........
Does anybody know if this affects "Dark Audacity" too?
Reply written about 2 months ago
Norton
According to a post on the official forum [1] the then-current version, 3.0.2, does not have the networking ability to 'phone home', but will be applied in future versions. It's still open source, so checkable, but take from this what you will. It's still a dodgy move, but version 2.x are available from FOSSHub [2]. Personally I will continue to use version 2, as it's a bit of an 'old friend', and gets a lot of jobs done quickly. Hopefully someone will fork a privacy-away version at some point.
So, there already exists a privacy-aware safe fork of Audacity. AlternativeTo at the rescue, as always :)
Tenacity lhttps://alternativeto.net/software/tenacity/about/ Tenacity is an easy-to-use, privacy-friendly, FLOSS, cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder for Windows, macOS, Linux and other operating systems.
Reply written about 1 month ago
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Olorin
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• Positive comment • 20 days ago • 0 replies
One of the best free audio editors around. Unfortunately, due to changes in their privacy policy (see above description and other comments) there are now concerns that the program has become on some level spyware.
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SV1987
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• Positive comment • 3 months ago • 1 reply
I use the old 2.1.2 version that I got in 2015. Whatever they collect now I do not care. The old program works fine and I like it. It has all the functions I need. I use around 5% of it's functionality. Very useful for daily, regular sound editing.
durhambell
Yeah, it didn't see a whole lot of development over the past 5-10 years. Some "under the hood" stuff, but not a ton of frontend stuff. The issues will arise if they make the improvements they are talking about. Press release is talking about development of a 3D spectrogram editable with haptic glove. It would be pretty wild to feel a spectrogram. Whether or not they will do it, or if it will actually be useful/adopted is another matter...
Reply written about 2 months ago
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Korwin
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• Negative comment • 3 months ago • 0 replies
It was a good app, free, feature rich. Until its developers changed their user agreement, starting to collect user data and transfer it to punitive authorities, including in Russia.
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JonPawzy
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• Negative comment • 3 months ago • 0 replies
Any privacy minded individual should avoid this project. The new "update" has nothing to do with sound, and everything to do with collecting personal data. Real shame.
I've used Audacity for a long long time, everything from editing early music attempts, to podcasts, to interview audio. It's definitely not the most powerful software in the world, but for the price of free, it does plenty.
Good alternative to Adobe Audition. It's complete and open-source.
According to fosspost.org Audacity has been acquired by an organization called MUSE, which has updated the privacy policy (PP) allowing for them to gather data, send it back to their servers, and do so in a way that makes you identifiable. Audacity reserves the right to share your data with staff, "any competent law enforcement body, government agency, court or third party", their auditors and legal representatives, and their potential buyers (PP.4.x). Your IP will be stored unhashed for a day (PP.6.1). They may store personal data (PP.6.2). Your data may be transferred across servers in Russia, the US, and the EEA (PP.7.1)
DO NOT USE.
I will use the old version. From behind a firewall it can't send any data anyway.
Reply written 3 months ago
Agreed, firewall should stop it. Still, it's dodgy. Would like to have time to check the source code and see how this data collection is implemented. Apparently the "Muse Group" is headquartered in Shanghai...soooooooo...........
Does anybody know if this affects "Dark Audacity" too?
Reply written about 2 months ago
According to a post on the official forum [1] the then-current version, 3.0.2, does not have the networking ability to 'phone home', but will be applied in future versions. It's still open source, so checkable, but take from this what you will. It's still a dodgy move, but version 2.x are available from FOSSHub [2]. Personally I will continue to use version 2, as it's a bit of an 'old friend', and gets a lot of jobs done quickly. Hopefully someone will fork a privacy-away version at some point.
[1] https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=119177
[2] https://www.fosshub.com/Audacity.html
Reply written about 1 month ago
So, there already exists a privacy-aware safe fork of Audacity. AlternativeTo at the rescue, as always :)
Tenacity
lhttps://alternativeto.net/software/tenacity/about/
Tenacity is an easy-to-use, privacy-friendly, FLOSS, cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder for Windows, macOS, Linux and other operating systems.
Reply written about 1 month ago
One of the best free audio editors around. Unfortunately, due to changes in their privacy policy (see above description and other comments) there are now concerns that the program has become on some level spyware.
I use the old 2.1.2 version that I got in 2015. Whatever they collect now I do not care. The old program works fine and I like it. It has all the functions I need. I use around 5% of it's functionality. Very useful for daily, regular sound editing.
Yeah, it didn't see a whole lot of development over the past 5-10 years. Some "under the hood" stuff, but not a ton of frontend stuff. The issues will arise if they make the improvements they are talking about. Press release is talking about development of a 3D spectrogram editable with haptic glove. It would be pretty wild to feel a spectrogram. Whether or not they will do it, or if it will actually be useful/adopted is another matter...
Reply written about 2 months ago
It was a good app, free, feature rich. Until its developers changed their user agreement, starting to collect user data and transfer it to punitive authorities, including in Russia.
Any privacy minded individual should avoid this project. The new "update" has nothing to do with sound, and everything to do with collecting personal data. Real shame.