Audacity 4.0
github.com1058 points by ClydeN 16 hours ago
1058 points by ClydeN 16 hours ago
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!
Indirectly related his video on music notation itself, "Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music"[1], is really good IMHO.
> Many people feel that western notation makes it unnecessarily hard to read music. If we want to sight read, learn music theory or just practice an instrument, surely there's a better way? Right? This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
Notation is cool and just right, the more I learned the more I appreciated how great contemporary notation is. Yes it's challenging to read sometines but the subject is challenging too, surely you could try to simplify it for certain applications but you'd lose a lot of flexibility.
Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard which is also extremely convenient thing to play compared to other stuff, even to grid controllers.
I find conventional Western notation works quite well for communicating notes, rhythms, and basic expression, but it breaks down pretty quickly once you move beyond that. E.g. a lot of the common techniques on electric guitar (bends, palm muting, tremolo/whammy bar stuff, pick slides, slap/thumping, pinch harmonics, raking) don't really have a convenient notational shorthand. That's without even mentioning synthesizers (how do you notate 'gradually increase the filter cutoff here'?) and DAWs, samplers, drum machines. But it's definitely a hard problem: the more information you try to shove into a notational system, the harder it gets for people to keep track of what everything means. Plus you just start running out of easily distinguishable symbols at some point.
I'm not sure what you are talking about wrt guitar and standard notation. Finger (PIMA) indication, staccato/legato, vibrato, tremolo, slurs, hammer, pulls, etc...it's all there. I don't see as much notation around hammer/pull as a classical player, but pick up a classical guitar music book sometime...you'll find that everything (guitar-related) you mentioned needing to be included, is already included.
Not sure what you consider convenient, but I’ve never had a problem reading electric guitar notation. It’s handled the same way we notate extended technique for other instruments - a combination of text above the staff, and squiggly lines on it :)
> (how do you notate 'gradually increase the filter cutoff here'?)
Use freeform text; it's a standard part of musical notation. Just because most of what you see on a score is some form or another of shorthand doesn't mean everything is.
How do you think Tom Lehrer was able to indicate a tempo of "Pornissimo"?
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/smut-m...
What?! I'm surprised those are the things you complain about regarding guitar sheet music.
The only real problem is guitar always has several different ways to play the same notes all over the neck and instrument tuning isn't always specified either.
Standard tuning may not work and tabs sometimes aren't there alongside the staff. If you're trying to sight read, you'll guess alright for a while until you are suddenly forced to make heroic leaps to the other end of the neck or painfully contort your fingers just so you don't miss a beat.
I guess I am maybe not coming from the same place you are here, but, fwiw, scores for classical guitar will often mark bare positions (basically, what fret your 1 finger is around) at certain points with Roman numerals, which then communicates, or at least implies, which string you are playing which note (for that part, until you see a new roman numeral). Also common to see simply a number on a specific note indicating a finger, as you do for a note+finger combo with piano scores, which then implies how to play the rest of the notes in that phrase or whatever. I don't think you need much more than that and it seems elegant enough to me!
But also, really, I was always taught that unless the composer specifies something specific, you are free to figure it on your own. Like there are only so many contexts where the timbral differences between two unison, fretted notes is going to matter probably, right? Also, how you play some part might be informed by where you are after the preceding part etc.
Tuning point though is kinda interesting and not all my wheel house. But they do call the default one standard for a reason!
Yes. I am thinking about rock, jazz, and fingerstyle playing. They're hardly edge cases and haven't been for decades. They're so popular and modern enough to prove the original point.
With regards to tuning, fingerstyle will often feature an arbitrary tuning unique to only a handful of songs. Timbre absolutely matters because you're playing multiple parts on one fretboard simultaneously.
Here's an example of all three genres in one performance! Kent Nishimura covering Steely Dan's "Peg" in fingerstyle. He does have a book available. It combines ordinary sheet music with tablature.
> Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard
Interestingly, the current form of a piano keyboard isn't only way keyed instruments have been laid out.
My mind was blown when I first saw a harpsichord with separate flat and sharp keys for example because I never considered the concept. I grew up with pianos so in my ignorance I never really thought about them being different.
there is also the janko keyboard. It looks a little scary but you can play in any key using the same hand shape.
The fundamental problem in music notation is that it was designed for an 8 note system and we use a 12 note system. It's.. fine I guess, they got those extra four notes in there and millions of people read music with no problems. But it does create a lot of confusion for novice readers who now think those 8 notes are somehow more important than the other 4 or that the sharps and flats are somehow half notes(they are not, all 12 are equally spaced on a log scale) and don't even get me started on the confusing terminology, there are 12 notes in an octet, semitones? a fifth? a fifth of what? it is seven notes or 3/2's there is no 5.
With regard to the piano keyboard, again not terrible, but it definitely is a compromise to fit the mechanical needs of the piano. I really like the design of the chromatic keyboard(ever see an accordion with the big hex grid of buttons, this is a chromatic keyboard), it has the advantage that whatever key you play a song in it has the same fingering, on a piano every key has different fingering, so there is a big skill barrier to changing keys that interferes with employment of such a critical aspect of playing.
A lot of Chesterton’s Fence going on here… I remember thinking this way when I still had a pretty low-level understanding of music (like, “I’m reading arbitrary pitches and pushing the matching keys on the piano”), but once I started understanding bigger musical concepts/chunks, the reason for the notation became clearer, and now I see why it’s a pretty good local maximum for readability.
The majority of music uses a system of intervals called the major scale, which is seven notes with a particular spacing that is determined largely by psychoacoustics (that is, we didn’t just make it up). That spacing can be shifted around to any point on the underlying 12-note system, which gives different keys/modes. On any single piece of music you’re typically using only one of those, so those seven notes are the “skeleton” underlying it all. This is what it means to say “this piece is in D major”. (BTW, a fifth is the fifth note in the major scale, so yes, there is a 5!)
Standard notation privileges these modes of the major scale, which means (assuming you know how to play all the major scales on your instrument) there’s a 1:1 mapping from places on the staff to scale degrees. That means most of the time you’re reading straight off the score into the scale your fingers have memorized.
The key signature is what makes this work. You can even instantly transpose by ignoring the written key signature and reading in another key. Chords are also made readable because they’re usually based on thirds, which happens to be the interval that makes the notes stack up exactly next to each other, so a triad, seventh chord, etc. is instantly recognizable.
So basically the notation is optimized for the common case (the music is using notes from a mode of the major scale) and makes exceptions (accidentals) stand out.
And yes, pianos are a pain because all the (musical) keys are different on the (physical) keys. However, pianos are great because all the octaves look exactly alike (so finding all the Ds on the keyboard is trivial). Stringed instruments like guitars or violins are the opposite: all the (musical) key fingerings are the same, but you have to memorize the positions of all the notes because they all look the same. Pick your poison.
Totally agree with your comment, but I just wanted to add that the major scales aren’t what’s prioritized - every major scale has a parallel minor scale with the same key signature.
In fact, this is true for all diatonic scales, which are the foundation of Western music and have been for centuries. The major scale is just the ionic, the minor is the aeolian. There’s also dorian, phrygian, lydian, etc., and all of these are in active use in popular music.
(Shout-out to our often overlooked friend, the lochrian scale. IYKYK. Practically unheard outside of Gregorian chants and metal.)
This is actually covered in the video. It's the "we should use a chromatic scale" argument and is surprisingly old.
The answer to why people don't use a chromatic scale is also in there. Very roughy, it's harder to sight read intervals between notes.
Standard music notation is a like a London Underground map, it's symbolic rather than literal.
Being more symbolic gives standard notation many advantages once you learn it.
The video does a much better job of explaining that than I've given. It really is very good.
I'll watch the video later but is it more difficult for singers or musicians of particular instruments?
For example, if you number the tones and have a piano style instrument with alternating white and black keys, then you can have a 6 line stave where spaces are always white keys and black keys are always lines.
I think the argument is that it gets harder to recognise tonal intervals the further they get apart on the stave.
When sight reading chords pianists, for example, don't really think about every note in the chord.
Instead if you recognise the intervals between the tones and the root you can just place your hand without thinking about it too much.
Since most of the time you're in a single musical key you don't need see every tone separately. You can still flatten, sharpen or normal and you can represent key changes too.
There are other details such as beginners often already using numbers to indicate preferred fingering. I guess that's not a big thing but if you use numbers as part of an alternative system you have to cover all of the edge cases and extensions.
Oh, just remembered another reason. Having a more compact staves means you can represent more musical parts on the same page which is important in orchestral situations where you might want to see what others are doing as you play.
I think that's a property of the piano though. If every note had an exact lining, it would seem to work better (unless you were very used to the old system).
It would still take more space on the page to represent the same amount of music which is also important.
Many people have tried to replace standard notation, over several hundred years, and no one has yet come up with a compelling alternative. So it's probably a very difficult task. Systems that are evolved over a long time, like musical notation, are often far more robust than those that are designed from scratch.
If you're really serious about proposing an alternative I would probably start by considering why other competing systems have failed.
I've thought the same, but as I really started to play and compose some music, it became clear that we almost exclusively use 5-7 note systems within a part of a music piece, and accidentals give great hints about what's going on musically. There is no need to use whole 12 semitones on the staff all the time
The problem with linnstrument and similar things is exactly equality of any note, it's not easy to think like "ok, here we move to another key, so we have to add one sharp here" on a controller like that. For me, even on a guitar I have to "see" the notes to play well and understand what I'm playing, so I had to learn "white keys" on the fretboard, and on top of that, learn octave numbers for each note, only then it really works for me and it's still hard compared to the keyboard where you see all sharps and flats and can treat them as you like. That's more important than using the same muscle memory imo
"designed for an 8 note system"
*7 note system
It's called an "octave" because the 8th note is considered another instance of the 1st.
> semitones? a fifth? a fifth of what? it is seven notes or 3/2's there is no 5.
I learned to read sheet music as a kid by my mom taking me to piano lessons. I cannot play the piano but I know where the notes are that correspond to the sheet music. I parlayed that into learning to play woodwinds when I got older. Even that was just enough to have fun. Nothing about it was me being serious about being a musician. So when other students would talk about 5ths and 3rds, I was totally lost. Then someone just said transpose the note up/down 5 notes (or 3 or whatever). They said it confidently, and they were first chair, so I went with it. I've never needed to know it, as I just play the notes as written on the sheet. I've never gigged where I had to play different keys.
But yeah, the fifth nomenclature confused the hell out of me too
> a fifth? a fifth of what?
Fifth (ordinal), not fifth (fraction).
That's why a whole tone is called a "second", not a "half".
This is why solfege aka "movable/relative do" is better than chromatic naming for theory. Because "a fifth of what?" is trivial - its the fifth named pitch relative to another named pitch. And almost all modern music is not about absolute pitch but the relationship of intervals, either in a single voice sequence or across multiple moving voices.
The transition from absolute to relative pitch is like moving from basic arithmetic to algebra, once it clicks. Except that relative pitch is way easier to understand without notation, pick a reference and go from there.
To sum up: you don’t like the current notation system, terminology and piano keys but also don’t have anything else to add to the discussion other than “I don’t like it”.
It is sort of like english spelling, we all know spelling in english sucks(So pointlessly difficult we have contests centered around the skill), we also all know we can do nothing to fix it. Still gonna complain about it however.
To me it's worse because you have to know which version of English. Is it grey or gray, color or colour, shop or shoppe? At least boot is spelled boot even if it is the trunk.
Sorta, except the video has many examples where folks tried to improve, but they ended up with more shortcomings than solutions.
Ultimately standard notation is still the best we have.
> fighting piano keyboard
Interestingly this is a strong thing to fight because there are pieces of music that are physically inaccessible to many players, particularly people with hands not wide enough for the intervals. No amount of practice or stretching can overcome it and you can't exactly travel with a piano or keyboard everywhere.
There some cool things like the Janko keyboard that seem strictly superior to the traditional 12 keys but it's kind of an uphill fight to build conversion kits cheap and light and good enough to travel and perform with.
His video about reality TV music, and the one about the newest musescore default font, are some of my favourite yt videos of all time. Great communicator.
Alternately, if you want to go on the same journey Keary (the person you mention) went on to form an opinion on what constitutes good vs. bad UX design in music/notation/DAW software, they've also put out a whole series of videos taking the piss out of the UX of most of the software in the field:
- Reason (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PFRyONURSo)
- Sibelius (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI)
- MuseScore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A)
- Dorico (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8)
This video is simply excellent. Really shows the challenges involved.
His other videos are awesome too. He is an expert in making great software AND a great video creator.
He also hit the nail on the head- reaction videos are just low effort click bait.
He also is guilty of an Internet-ism that is about as low effort click bait as reaction videos:
> AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
Self-aggrandising bullshit.
So, they've realized podcasters and vloggers are a large part of their target audience. Then I believe they have to implement some models for speech restoration.
These days most people just Adobe Podcast Enhance and forget and, from what I've seen there isn't an open source GUI based tool for automated voice processing out there.
Must add that it's so awesome to have an open source Qt based audio editor on KDE Plasma that does not look like shit!
Yes, Tantacrul. Pretty weird story, a composer and programmer who absolutely roasted the UIs of well known sheet music dinosaurs Finale and Sibelius in hilarious diss videos on YouTube. Then he conceded a bit reluctantly that Musescore was the better of the lot, but still had plenty of opinions on how it could be better.
So the guitar tabs website which had then recently acquired Musescore offered him a job. Not just a job, but basically to be boss of the whole thing. Then they bought audacity, staffpad and Hal Leonard too. Then they bought out their private equity backer.
I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up. They haven't enshittified it (from my perspective as a user anyway). It seems in the end these people just loved music more than they loved money.
He, unfortunately, left recently. https://x.com/Tantacrul/status/2092817784782598440
> I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up.
Just remember bad news sells. I'm reasonably sure there are a number of other cases where this happens, likely most. However they are not big news and not memorable so I can't cite them.
If it happens all the time and it's positive, you shouldn't need a news story to confirm it. People should just be able to think of examples.
Certainly I'm able to think of plenty of terrible results from private equity take-overs from my own personal experience as an employee or as a customer.
Private equity gets a bad rap in large part because the stories they're most famous for are the "PE buys a failing company, and the company subsequently finally fails," with the "failing" word conspicuously absent in most retellings. I'm not sure I've heard one of those stories where the company failed after being acquired by PE where it wasn't already failing before the PE takeover...
What PE loves to do (and where I think a lot of the vibe comes from) is buying companies from owners who care about the craft and turning them into companies that care about nothing but money.
Let's say you make an app for first responders. Being a former first responder, you know exactly what your users need and what the workflows should be like. Your app becomes a brand name in the community. You charge enough to survive (if that), because your app is a labour of love more than anything else.
Eventually, family and other responsibilities get in the way, and you just no longer have the time or motivation to maintain the app any more. You sell to "we so swear we are not private equity" Applause.
As soon as you do that, the app gets taken over by financiers and developers who are experts at "revenue optimization", with little domain knowledge about what first responders need. They calculate (probably correctly) that they can milk their customers for a lot more if they move to a subscription plan, gate some features behind expensive premium packages, stuff the app full of upsell pop-ups and fill it with analytics SDKs that tell them which features are worth spending development time on, and which can safely be removed.
Ooh, who could this be... so many contenders... Aladtect, PSTrax, Lexipol...
For me, private equity gets a bad rep because they've bought up all of the local mom and pop shops for just about any service I need thats face to face. All of the plumbers, electricians, general contractors, vets, grocery chains, coffee shops, and other shit were bought and had every ounce of revenue squeezed out of them. The result? All of the things I need locally cost 3-5x they did and the service is far worse.
And as a quick edit: none of these examples I have were of failing businesses. Each of the owners had their reasons, but none was due to it being necessary for survival. PE on hackernews tends to focus on software/bigger purchases, but so much of the damage in my opinion is on the local and smaller scale.
Concur. Private equity is synonymous with the concept of maximum extraction in my experience.
Well, many things may be going wrong before PE gets involved, or the owners may be retiring and it just will never be the same again even if PE didn't buy. So it's more likely to feel like bad news even if it was still a reasonable outcome.
As a public, well-known example, Dell being taken private in 2013 seemed to work out.
I'd guess the majority of those success stories are invisible to the end user.
e.g. simply keeping the company afloat via PE cash.
If I recall correctly, this is what happened to Hilton Hotels. They were collapsing during the housing crisis.
A slightly different scenario but Hertz is a PE success story. It was owned by Ford and bought by a private equity firm. Now it's a standalone company making mint.
Were those roll-ups though? I see a poster below says the private equity fund was only involved for the last acquisition, but no one can deny Muse Group/Ultimate Guitar went on a shopping spree. They looked like they were trying to gain control over a whole segment and start squeezing (well, except for that open source projects aren't that easy to squeeze). No wonder people freaked out over the telemetry, it was reasonable to fear the worst. But everything went better than expected.
>If it happens all the time and it's positive, you shouldn't need a news story to confirm it. People should just be able to think of examples.
Most enshittification I am familiar with is because I read it in the news, therefore if non-shittification does happen it is likely I do not hear about it. I suppose the same holds true for other people.
If you were correct and people just had to hear about it then people wouldn't go around worrying about violent crime, because of always seeing on the news, despite it having fallen to historic lows. Instead people should be just walking around talking about how safe and non-violent the streets are nowadays.
AFAIK, Francisco Partners was only involved in the Hal Leonard acquisition.
It was more of a partnership regarding Hal Leonard than ownership of Muse.
It seems after the Native Instruments fiasco, they (Francisco Partners) just decided to quit music altogether.
EDIT: I know a lot of people from Muse and Native Instruments and that's the impression a lot seem to have.
MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar unfortunately both have some dark patterns around subscriptions and data collection. But yeah very weird situation
This site is a lot like how I remember ultimate guitar, being that you can look up tabs and access them. I hope people keep uploading more tabs because ultimate still has a larger volume
>conceded a bit reluctantly that Musescore was the better of the lot
Well he said that Sibelius was the best for serious musicians, it just had a horrible UI.
I remember using Audacity back in 2006-ish, I just needed some basic mp3 editing and I was so happy with it. Has been my go to audio editor for, goodness feels weird to say, decades now, awesome to hear them staying alive and improving. Hooray opensource / PE not killing something good!
Not trying to hate because a FOSS audio editor is great, but all of these UI improvements are carbon copies from conventional DAWs or video editors, invented 30 or so years ago. Like giving audio clips a header which lets you move them around, or letting you adjust the audio clip start/end by dragging the start/end of the clip, are not exactly revolutionary in 2026. Maybe Audacity will re-invent automation lanes next? I'm not against it. I don't see how any of this requires user studies and the framing as some kind of breakthrough though.
Beat me to it, I was just about to post this. It's a really cool breakdown of what goes into supporting and modernising such old open source software.
Damn this guy is well versed on the topic at hand. Really clear and nice video.
I don't even need to watch that video to be reminded of the tagline - "Audacity says no!". Agreed this is a great watch for pretty much any developer.
Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based):
It should be illegal to announce a UI update and not include at least screenshots, so thanks for sharing.
The URL should probably be its landing page, which does a good job with the overview: https://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-4/
Usually I can’t stand scroll animated pages but they actually did a nice job at it.
Wow, looks amazing. Qt6 seems to be really great.
Is there a free open source tool for video editing that has the same UX chops?
In case you missed it, yesterday there was a hn post about openshot 4 (also a Qt modernization release)
It seems like the new UI look doesn't have light mode available and the only option to have it is to switch back to the old UI? That's a weird choice.
They do appear to have a light mode, along with general UI customizability according to the homepage [1].
I usually hate product announce videos but this one is so concise and fast and to the point, I'm very impressed. Also wow the new UI looks delicious!
Best thing is it's not just a new coat of paint; there seem to be some very significant usability improvements in here.
Delicious really is a great word! It looks gorgeous and so pleasant to use.
Yeah, it is a hand-made video! Someone put actual work into it. :-) Results are speaking.
Lost me at QT.
Why do you care so much about the UI framework used?
[flagged]
Or he just prefers GTK. I sure like it better than QT.
No person who has written software with both prefers GTK :D
I can still use and develop GTK2 software in Debian out-of-the-box, but not Qt3 or even Qt4.
Yes, because GTK2 is so difficult to upgrade to new versions, whereas Qt4 to Qt5 usually only involved replacing a few identifiers (cannot speak to Qt6 since I don't do Qt anymore). That's why distros need to drag GTK2 along even though we are already at GTK4.
I work on the IUP fork, where I have and support the Qt driver, which works with both Qt5 and Qt6, and I only need a couple of checks to make it work on both. I often check if I broke the Qt5 build; nope, all good there, hard to break. For GTK3 and GTK4, those must be separate drivers; there's no way you can handle that with a couple of checks. Everything is different. That was possible to some extent and works with GTK2/GTK3 (single driver), but there are so many checks and workarounds there. Qt is so nice to work with.
> so difficult to upgrade to new versions
Perhaps, because GTK developers insist, that GTK2, GTK3, GTK4 are different toolkits.
> Qt4 to Qt5 usually only involved ...
I'd start with Qt3 to Qt4.