Technology

Wow. Tech and a dad joke joke.

👏😂

I don't like it on desktop but goddamn, it sucks even more on mobile. I was swiping to scroll through the stupid horizontal menu and then when I got to the bottom of it, turns out I was scrolling so fast I basically teleported to the bottom of the page.

I automatically assume their 'ui update' is bad based on their website alone.

Marketing consultants and web designers, mostly. It's a cash cow for them. Companies will inexplicably pay large sums of money for a dynamic website with such ass user experience.

It must look really good in board meetings when they run it on commercial-grade hardware to show their bosses, otherwise I can't imagine anyone involved has actually tried using those websites.

CEOs and shareholders seem to like them too for some reason. Maybe it bumps up their company valuation or something? Or gives them a reason to give lucrative contracts to their cousin's brother-in-law's nephew's freelance business?

in april 2021, they were purchased by MuseScore;

a few weeks later, they announced that they would introduce Google Analytics and Yandex-based “telemetry”. After strong criticism by the community, Muse Group backtracked, emphasized their commitment to the GPL license, dropped their plans to include Google/Yandex tracking, and instead opted for a self-hosted solution for bug reports and update checks. Both can be disabled, and some distributions disable them by default.

that one was a nothingburger imo as it was always opt-in, was never merged, and planned to only be in testing builds

in july they proposed and then backtracked on a baffling new privacy policy and said they had really overzealous lawyers that they somehow mistrusted lawyers doing so “out of an abundance of caution”, which resolves the issue in my books—within two weeks, which is why i’m not absolving them, but it's been five years since 2021 and absolutely no nonsense has happened.

in fact, audacity has since gained a ton of productivity improvements, outlined in the video https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38 that does have a conflict of interest

tl;dr: i still support audacity

receipts: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/889 , https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/1353, and everything these link

https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity

Surprisingly, the Internet seems to look mostly favourably on Audacity these days. I never really kept up with it at the time, but apparently all the allegedly heinous (mis)features were opt-in. (Further verification of this may be required.)

I can't tell if that's the result of a really good scrubbing of bad search results or whether they genuinely cleaned up their act.

Either way, Tenacity, the fork that came about as a result of the controversy, still exists, and apparently has themes to change the look just like Audacity is claiming to have done now, so if you're uncertain, that's always an option.

When you start the app for the first time it asks if you want to enable anonymous telemetry, but otherwise I don't think it sends anything.

Why?

What AI? Did they do some sort of LLM integration or use LLM-spewed code?

I mostly just think they should've kept the color scheme from the original.

There were UI improvements

Barely. It's the same old terrible UI and needs a complete overhaul.