I thought audacity was tarnished with spyware or something these days. Is it safe again?
after looking into it:
it's not and it never was.
a) it's open source, so nobody's putting that shit in there without getting caught
b) it had an opt-in error reporting feature that would send data back... that was the entire thing...
What? You must be joking. Really? The entire thing was about opt-in error reporting?
.... seriously, that can't be it, can it?
Not really that simple, it was an apparent change to the privacy policy that vaguely anticipated collection of arbitrary user data, which shook the confidence of the open source community on the project. The fact this happened right after audacity was sold was the cherry on top.
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213
Changes were eventually reverted or revised.
yep... really just that...
i've used it forever with a very restrictive firewall and i've never seen it do anything unexpected... or any phoning home at all...
It was a pull request to add opt-out analytics that got blown out of proportion, where the real issue was the EULA and how tonedeaf of a move it was considering the community around Audacity. IIRC, they ended up replacing it with opt-in analytics.
Not really, but there is a fork called tenacity which fixes this
[Edit: indeed, its actually good that it's 2gb]
2gb plugin??!
Btw, does it work with tenacity?
AI models are often multiple gigabytes, tbh it's a good sign that it's not "AI" marketing bullshit (less of a risk with open source projects anyway). I'm pretty wary of "AI" audio software that's only a few megabytes.
It seems reasonable given it includes multiple AI models.
2gb is pretty normal for an AI model. I have some small LLM models on my PC and they're about 7-10gb big. The big ones take up even more space.
I've been using the OpenVINO plugins for a few weeks and it's genuinely impressive. Noise cancelling is one thing, but the transcription tool is amazing. I can create subtitles from conference recordings in minutes and create transcripts of recorded zoom calls, etc. and it does it for multiple languages.
That's the kind of shit I like using AI for.
The music separation and speech transcription plug-ins actually sound nice. Obviously that will depend on how reliable they actually are.
I just tried the OpenVINO transcription on a random speech-over-music mp3 I happened to have: it works great, FAR better quality than I expected (I think I was expecting Youtube quality, but this is much cleaner and clearer). Perfect capitalization, good sentence breaks, adequate punctuation (commas, periods, question marks).
Only problem is that I can't figure out how to copy the transcription so I can paste it outside Audacity: the transcriptions show up attached to specific portions of sound, like track labels. While it will save me the trouble of having to actually transcribe audio manually, to get them out of Audacity and into a word processor it looks like I may still be stuck copying each "label" individually unless I can find a way to copy or export them.
EDITED TO ADD: I just answered my own question, lol. File -> Export Other -> Export Labels -> .txt file
I read "Audacity ads" and thought for a moment they had gone to the dark side
...and Audacity for Windows 64-bit is required to run these plugins.
Useless.
On lemme I'm often reminded of the vegan joke:
How do you tell if someone is a Linux user? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
Windows only :(
According to the repo, it builds fine on Linux. They just don't distribute a binary for it.
https://github.com/intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity/issues/27
I'm sure I used to use Audacity back in the day as a free, quick and dirty editor to splice up audio tracks. I'm talking at least 10 years ago.
Had no idea it was still even a thing.
It's honestly pretty much the industry standard for indie creators. There's nothing super flashy about it, it just does its job very well.
This along with 7-zip and OBS and the like have been pretty impressive success stories for FOSS, even if most of their users don't even know what that means.
Was the training data ethically sourced (for music generation)?
How do music creators feel about their work potentially being regenerated and used in other's works?
Oh boy this is what I always wanted woooo
Audacity just doesn't seem worth the trouble after discovering Reaper and how powerful it is for only $60.
I'm a sound engineer and I use different DAWs for different purposes. There's just no one DAW that does all, so this is a compromise I'm happy to go with.
When I do podcast editing, I use Audacity to split multi-track WAV files and for truncating silence. It's just waaaay easier to do this there than on Reaper. Plus it has a loopback recording feature built-in which I use for Zoom meeting recordings etc.
I use Pro Tools for audio post, but for most of what I do I'm a Reaper guy. It's very powerful as you said and it just works.
I know it can be a hassle switching DAWs (muscle memory on shortcuts can get weird), but for me, I like making the most of the strengths of a tool rather than forcing something to do everything.
I see what you mean, in your case as well as mine, Reaper is far more powerful and so far more adequate to our needs But people do not always search for powerful software. Sometimes they only want something easy to learn, with only basic tasks but well performed and entirely free. When you have these requirements, Audacity is better
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