It certainly has been rough. I've been improving small bits of it for the past 4 years, but a big UI improvement is coming sometime next year. Let me know if you want to join a user testing session.

What plugins don't work? We've added support to the major plugin formats (VST3, VST2, AudioUnits) in the past few years.

Audacity 4.0 at least will bring the current capabilities with some better UX and visuals over. Do give it a try when we release the alpha/beta, hopefully later this year.

fwiw, we've made some great improvements to the music workflow during Audacity's 3.x development. Before, it was practically unusable for music, now it's... alright, provided you have recorded music (loops) to work with. We really need to make some big changes on the backend to do MIDI, latency, ...

Where did we fuck up?

What do you prefer about it?

Oh btw - the point of that thing was to provide some level of exposure to the thing until we can figure out how to do it properly. We'll remove that menu item soon, as we have built a proper "get effects" window now where the various effects can live.

"AI" is a somewhat silly label, I agree. If the AI hype hadn't come around, we probably would've called it "machine learning-based effects" or something. The useful effects from that are pattern recognition anyway

What version is this? I believe we fixed a bug like this some time ago

Also - calling Audacity in its current form spyware is patently nonsense. Calling Audacity spyware a month after that article would've been nonsense, too.

The first version of the privacy policy was very shitty, but a document does not magically create a portal into your machine that sends all your data to a three letter agency. All associated code for this, both proposed and actually implemented, would not have allowed for "spyware" activity.

It never was spyware, and the article you linked says as much. Also, since that article was written, the privacy policy has been reduced in scope and clarified several times, I recommend reading it: www.audacityteam.org/desktop-priv...

yes, that's the rationale for MP2 and MP1 existing: MP3 is somewhat computationally complex, and back in the day that was a problem - hence why radio stuff was done with MP2. FLAC is designed to decode super quickly (though encoding takes forever)

I mean, they are free to use and you can parse them in whatever way you want. It's just that they assume many things on the inner workings of Audacity which generally aren't helpful to other programs. I recommend using DAWproject or OpenTimelineIO instead. github.com/bitwig/dawpr...

ah, an outdated article that does not cover the current privacy policy (or even the policy that 3.0.3 eventually got released under).

What's applicable is the privacy policy: www.audacityteam.org/desktop-priv...

And you don't have to send anything, you can disable update checking if you don't value it as a feature. Though if you do have it enabled, you need to send your IP address because that's just how the internet works.

They did, that's how Markus Hess got caught.

We meanwhile immediately destroy the IP address prior to logging. No 24 hour retention.

There literally was never a time you could download a file without anyone being aware of it. Not even in 1986.

Also, if you think that update checking is a commercial feature - why does VLC and LibreOffice have it?

As it turns out, real users generally want new features and bugfixes.