Post #3357120

2026-06-19 22:22 UTC

It’s as Tantacrul (the new head designer of the app) would put it A lot of little things that all add up The app was taken over by Musescore team, owned (as in, paid a salary by) a russian private company called UltimateGuitar. They’ve already made a lot of really, really bad decisions on regards to Musescore, and they’re bound to do the same to Audacity. They just had a lot less time to do it and a lot more pushback from the much larger (and as such more healthy) Audacity community. They’ve added a bunch of features. They also fixed core faults with the app: included nondestructive editing and fixed some UX issues. Which is great. However, these positive things are just the tip of the “changes” iceberg. And the bottom gets dark, fast. Firstly, they tend to make bloat. Musescore 2 and 3 ran mich faster than Musescore 4. It isn’t even comparable, and Audacity is bound to follow the same path. The new UI looks great, but it introduces its own issues. Such as turning the app’s UI into a generic modern one, which some people dislike. With Musescore the changes were relatively contained, but Audacity’s UI, UX and workflow was changed as fundamentally as it could have. Old Audacity and New Audacity are basically different tools to learn because of it. And the switch to New Audacity is easier for users from any other DAW (such as Protools, Logic, Ableton) than Old Audacity. Because Old Audacity wasn’t a traditional DAW, but it became one. Then there’s the final layer: all the changes a for-profit overtake means for a FOSS project. A nice example of past corporate FOSS takeovers is listed quite nicely here, but it doesn’t give any nuance nor list the common strategies used, or how both the app and its users are harmed by that. There’s also a nice discussion over on lemmy.ca (this one), but it requires quite a bit of background in FOSS terminology to be fully graspable. A small part of the specific Audacity situation is explained quite nicely here, and a more lenghty discussion is available on the forum “Hacker News” (link). Hope these links feed at least some inquisitive minds :-)

Replies (1)

@Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-06-20 00:53

the switch to New Audacity is easier for users from any other DAW (such as Protools, Logic, Ableton) than for Old Audacity users as an Old Audacity user I disagree with that. it is still extremely hard to use audacity as a DAW because it’s very much still a multitrack audio editor with some beat-based features and non-destructive effects. i don’t think clips were too hard to adjust to Musescore was changed from a fully offline app to one tightly integrated into an online ecosystem. I am also an old Musescore user. You would be a little right to talk about audio.com and pretty on the nail to talk about MuseHub but musescore.com absolutely not. musescore.com’s been a thing since 2010 (MuseScore was only founded 2008 and acquired 2017) with the “Save Online” feature. Hal Leonard sued this small project for storing copyvio scores back in the old '10s (and now Muse Group owns Hal Leonard). And it’s not like they’ve “integrated” it any more either; it’s just blumming uploading scores same as it always has been since 2010. look at MuseHub. those shiny new effects and mixing, you have to use proprietary MuseHub. and then even then you can still use MuseScore entirely offline to do anything it could do in 3.x (that’s pre-acquisition for those unfamiliar with MuseScore version numbers).

Open ##3357858