Audacity acquired by firm behind MuseScore and Ultimate Guit

[ElmerJFudd]

"Audacity acquired by Muse Group

News of the deal broke out by Martin Keary, Head Of Design at MuseScore. In his video statement, Keary claimed responsibility to 'manage Audacity in partnership with its open-source community'. The financials surrounding the acquisition have not been discussed, which is understandable. I"d feel silly paying for Audacity after using it for free for literal decadesâ¦"

 

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[AnotherScott]

Obama spoke of the audacity of hope. I guess these guys have hopes for audacity.

[CEB]

Audacity just acquired Radio.com or it was a recent branding change.

[ProfD]

I was getting ready to download Audacity to my newer laptop. Maybe I'll use this news as a sign to stick with using Ableton Live.

[KuruPrionz]

Pick a DAW and stay there, that's what I did. It wasn't Audacity. I tried it once, didn't need a new learning curve for something I could already do. Waveform has a nice free version that will probably remain free, I use the paid version to support them.

[Docbop]

That's good news for the core developers of Audacity they should get a steady paycheck now. This happens in FOSS world all the time and just means the engineers will work for the owners on Audacity and other projects the company has. I doubt Audacity will become a commercial product, but they probably will use some of Audacity code in adding on to Musescore. They might try doing like when Red Hat Linux when commercial they spun off a FOSS version called CentOS that is same except one revision behind.

 

Audacity is a excellent small/entry level DAW that many students and people on a budget live on. I have friends in the voice over community and they use Audacity a lot. So good for Audacity.

[Mike Davis]

Obama spoke of the audacity of hope. I guess these guys have hopes for audacity.

 

Clever!

[Reezekeys]

I've never tried using it as a DAW, but for certain kinds of global edits on sound files I think it's fantastic and a real timesaver. E.g., converting a stereo file to two mono files - why have to launch a DAW, import the file, set up a track, buss to aux tracks, bounce, etc. Can't beat the price either!

[Doerfler]

I have been using Audacity for about 15 years now. It's fantastic.

[Mark Schmieder]

I tried Audacity several times over the years, but it's been eons by now.

 

They still hadn't addressed the core data integrity issues the last time I checked, so I found it 100% dangerous and unusable.

 

I'm not sure how anyone can get along with an application that doesn't buffer anything. It crashed a lot on macOS, and bye-bye went my original source file.

 

This was before Time Machine backups, so I'd have to go to older backups, maybe a day before if I was lucky.

 

Pretty hard to train oneself to make an exception for just one application, to consistently remember to always copy the working file before opening it in the app.

 

The lack of undo/redo was also a killer, in conjunction with the dangerous way it works with the file system.

[Doerfler]

I tried Audacity several times over the years, but it's been eons by now.

 

Many things have gotten much better in "eons".

[Mark Schmieder]

Maybe so, but over the course of ten years, its core flaws didn't change, so I figured it was "artistic vision". Plenty of other products improved in leaps and bounds during that time.

[Piktor]

I'm with Reezekeys. Audacity has been a pretty handy tool for jobs that don't require a full featured DAW. I have used it to learn tunes. You can loop sections, slow tracks down without changing pitch, etc. I have used it to record, edit and digitize many of my vinyl albums too. Very handy for simple cut and paste and normalizing jobs.

[tunaman]

Yep, and mixing down tracks, creating click tracks, etc. I"ve been using a long time myself and find it to be extremely useful. The later versions are quite stable, from my experience.

[ElmerJFudd]

Audacity always seemed to be the default free alternative when all you needed to do was edit audio. It"s user interface is not glamorous, although it is reasonably feature-full. Would they be successful in monetizing it? Probably not, there are plenty of other free alternatives, and even more that give you a fully featured DAW for registering an email address.

[EricBarker]

MuseScore is fantastic and free as well. I can't imagine they'll monetize Audacity if they haven't done so with MuseScore by now. I've pretty much switched over from Sibelius. It may not be the be-all-and-end-all of notation software, but for day-to-day charting it's fantastic.

[Doerfler]

Would they be successful in monetizing it?

 

It's open source software, monetizing it would kill it.

[stoken6]

In case it's not obvious, Martin Keary is Tantacrul on YouTube, and has a number of entertaining videos on his channel. I linked to his vid on "corporate music" sometime back which I enjoyed.

 

Agree that if moneti[sz]ation was the goal, MuseScore would have been the first to receive a price tag.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[Zalman Stern]

The company around MuseScore does sell apps associated with the program plus I believe some sort of user content hosting or non-user content subscription service. (I bought the iOS app to display scores on an iPad.) Similar for Audacity is totally doable.

 

-Z-

[ElmerJFudd]

The MuseScore app I believe is free but they monetized the website, right? As a Store for people who create with the app?

[Markay]

I have used both Audacity and MuseScore 4 eva on Windows. Found both to be excellent at doing what they claim on the tin. Are there better for profit apps? Sure, but as an amateur they do everything I need. This seems like a marriage made in heaven.

[Theo Verelst]

I know Audacity from Linux for a very long time, and it's ok to have such as that from the beginning it incorporated a big number of existing processing plugins, IIRC the Ladspa Linux plugins.

 

There's no problem monetizing Free and Open Source software, Redhat does that with a complete operating system already since a long time, Enterprise Linux being commercial, Centos being probably the biggest Cloud OS (From AWS) and Fedora a big (and also Open Source and Free) experimentation OS (I happen to use on my machines).

 

The disadvantage from Audacity, for which there are alternatives that are also F.O.S. which can at leat on Linux be drawn in with one easy enough command, when I tested it while ago was that it can *change your audio*... So you load a file in, mess with it without changing anything, save it, and find out the copy isn't the same as the original. That's mission critical fail for all my main purposes. I haven't tested this recently, but an alternative which didn't change bits in my file fragments was "Sweep", at least on Linux (I don't know if it exists on W10).

 

T.