Audacity (audio editor)
Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems.[4][5]
Not to be confused with Audacious (software) or Audacy.Developer(s)
Muse Group
The Audacity Team
May 28, 2000
38 languages
GPL v2 or later, CC-BY-3.0 (documentation)[6] [7]
As of December 6, 2022, Audacity is the most popular download at FossHub,[8] with over 114.2 million downloads since March 2015. It was previously served by Google Code and SourceForge, where it was downloaded over 200 million times. It is now part of Muse Group.
It is licensed under GPL-2.0 or later. Executables with VST3 support are licensed GPL-3-only to maintain license compatibility.[6][7]
History[edit]
The project was started in the fall of 1999 by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon University, initially under the name CMU Visual Audio.[9] On May 28, 2000, Audacity was released as Audacity 0.8 to the public.[10][11]
Mazzoni eventually left CMU to pursue software development and in particular development of Audacity, with Dannenberg remaining at CMU and continuing development of Nyquist, a scripting language which Audacity uses for some effects.[9]
Over the years, additional volunteer contributors emerged, including James Crook who started the fork DarkAudacity to experiment with a new look and other UX changes.[12] Most of its changes were eventually incorporated into the mainline version and the fork ended.[13]
In April 2021, it was announced that Muse Group (owners of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar) would acquire the Audacity trademark and continue to develop the application, which remains free and open source.[14]
Language support[edit]
In addition to English, Audacity is available in Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Corsican, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Marathi, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh.[43]
The documentation, the Audacity Manual, is available only in English.[44] The Audacity Forum offers technical support in English.
Reception[edit]
As free and open-source software, Audacity is very popular in education, encouraging its developers to make the user interface easier for students and teachers.[45]
Audacity won the SourceForge 2007 and 2009 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia.[46][47]
Jamie Lendino of PC Magazine recently rated it 4/5 stars Excellent and said: "If you're looking to get started in podcasting or recording music, it's tough to go wrong with Audacity. A powerful, free, open-source audio editor that's been available for years, Audacity is still the go-to choice for quick-and-dirty audio work."[48]
CNET rated Audacity 5/5 stars, calling it "feature-rich and flexible".[49] Preston Gralla of PC World said: "If you're interested in creating, editing, and mixing you'll want Audacity."[50] Jack Wallen of Tech Republic praised its features and ease-of-use.[51]
In The Art of Unix Programming (2003), open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond wrote of Audacity: "The central virtue of this program is that it has a superbly transparent and natural user interface, one that erects as few barriers between the user and the sound file as possible."[52]
Some reviewers and users have criticized Audacity for its inconvenient UX design, unsightly GUI and comparative lack of features compared with Adobe Audition. Matthew McLean wrote: "Audacity looks a bit more dated and basic, but this will be appealing to many folks who’re just starting out".[53]
[54]
In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[55] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[56] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead.[57] Another controversy in July 2021[58] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would "occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA".[59] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added "out of an abundance of caution".[58]