Audacity 4.0 Rebuilds Its Interface on Qt with a New Clip-Editing Model
Audacity 4.0 is a major rewrite that rebuilds the open-source audio editor's interface on Qt, bringing native high-DPI rendering and a host of quality-of-life improvements. The new clip-editing model lets you select, group, and freely place clips, with a dedicated split tool and smarter paste. The UI has been modernized with dockable panels, workspaces, themes, and a new Home screen. Playback and recording gain a visible draggable playhead, seek-while-playing, and ASIO support on Windows. The update introduces the .aup4 project format, while .aup3 projects convert without altering originals. Some Audacity 3 features like Time Tracks and the Mixer are missing but planned for future releases.
And last but not least, we had the audacity to change the Audacity logo.
- Lautzi
I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch!
- dbcooper
Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based):
- ancientstraits
I have been using Audacity 3 for making music with samples for a few years. And it sort of worked, but there were a lot of things that were inconvenient, like the project sometimes not saving, or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip.
I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them.
- pelagicAustral
Whatever happened with the post-telemetry fork debacle projects? Tenacity, Sneedacity, or something...
- Sophira
How's the telemetry situation nowadays? I haven't been updating my copy for a while.
- 2b3a51
Downloaded the AppImage, chmod +x and ran it from my user space on Debian Trixie under Gnome. I went for light, colourful and modern UI, skipped the login/cloud invite, disabled the telemetry and started it up.
Quite chatty when running it from the terminal, but seems to be working well on my Thinkpad X250 landfill laptop. Looks 'flat' and all in the modern style, but adapts to the 1366x768 letterbox that is my screen nicely.
- AbuAssar
in the age of 500MB apps (thanks to electron); it is refreshing to see a sub-50MB app again.
- elevation
Is the team funded off audacity merch sales? What's the most effective way for me to support the continuity of their work?