This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I thought audacity was tarnished with spyware or something these days. Is it safe again?
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.
Tensorflowlite models are tiny, but they're potentially as much an audio revolution as synthetizer were in the 70s. It's hard to tell if that's what we're looking at here.
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 read "Audacity ads" and thought for a moment they had gone to the dark side
We already had a scare with them, but turns out it was very unfair overreaction to the project.
In this case I'm happy as long as it's hardware platform independent and uses open source released models.
AI music art has been for a long time in the hands of industry moguls and us peasants have had nothing. So I'm happy with anything that puts this power in the hands of the everyman.
Was it unfair? I haven't been following since they got bought out by spyware?
EDIT: Audacity was acquired by a company called MuseGroup in 2021 who added unnecessary telemetry and they admit that they do provide the data the collect to third parties. Some claim the changes were reverted but I haven't confirmed that myself so until I see there is no telemetry it's spyware as far as I'm concerned.
Use Tenacity instead
What's the difference?
In April 2021, Muse Group acquired the famous audio editing applicaiton Audacity. Their goals for Audacity were to bring much needed improvements to Audacity. However, not too long after, there was an attempt to add telemetry to the program
Ok so what's Tenacity? A fork pre shittification?
Aye, but a little more convoluted. TL;DR: Several new projects forked to avoid the enshitification, and with much time and drama, most of the actually active maintainers joined forces under the Tenacity name+repo. (And 4chan was part of the drama, because of course they were.)
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.
Oh boy this is what I always wanted woooo
...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.
