Audacity 4.0 beta lets you test its new (nicer) Qt interface
36 points by raymii
36 points by raymii
such a shame that Tantacrul stepped away from audacity development, his youtube videos on user interface design in professional music software are such a treat
Here's a transcript of his linked tweets for people without an X account:
@Tantacrul (May 23 2026)
Quick announcement about Audacity and MuseScore Studio: as I've mentioned in a few places online, I've been gradually stepping away from my position at Muse to focus on some new projects of my own.
MuseScore Studio was fully handed over in Feb. Audacity just recently.
Audacity needed more time. Now that V4 is feature complete (though there’s still a lot planned for 4.1 to fully complete the transition), the team can now spend the remaining months fixing bugs and polishing everything for launch. My presence is no longer essential.
I've spent a lot of time getting the two teams in shape, so they can fully operate without me. The most significant underlying work has been done to enable fast / innovative development. Both apps have a very long roadmap ahead of them.
No real big drama here. 6 years is a long time and I've a lot of other things I want to do. I'm all about big overhauls to get projects on track. Here's hoping the two teams & Muse do well. I will no longer have any involvement, aside from being a community contributor.
Last thing:
From now on, I'm not the guy! So enquiries about features, jobs, proposals, complaints, etc. should go to the appropriate people at Muse.
Of course, I'll be doing new things... and I'll speak about all that soon!
This is a good thing, IMO. Tantacrul has done a lot of damage to his reputation, even around Audacity (the Google trackers were a huge debacle).
I guess it should be called out that Audacity was bought a few years ago[1] by Muse Group, owners of Ultimate Guitar[2], which is why this looks like a fairly large departure from the 3.x version, and why it seems to be getting commercialized.
1: https://librearts.org/2021/05/ultimate-guitar-launches-muse-group-and-acquires-audacity/
Ultimate guitar is ad-ridden, notably with bait-y video previews pretending to be a lesson to learn the specific song you are looking for. Gimme OLGA back!
(On Android, chord reader makes ultimate guitar bearable though.)
The worst part of Audacity is BY FAR the endless maze of submenus for effects. The screenshots have nicer styling and I'm sure it handles HiDPI better, but it doesn't appear like they addressed the submenu situation.
This is a necessary step towards beginning on that.
Why is that unresolvable with wxwidgets?
Acording to the former lead developer, it took the team significantly longer to implement UI changes in wxwidgets compared with Qt, pixel-correctness / antialiasing / transparency was challenging, and platform-dependent behaviour was frustrating. If Qt lets the team work faster and less painfully, making big changes should be less intimidating.
Haven't used Audacity in years, but have some A/V work to do soon... is https://tenacityaudio.org/ the best of the non-Muse telemetry free options around?
Is Tantacrul's YouTube video How We're Redesigning Audacity For The Future from eight months ago still relevant?