What do you think about the new Audacity 4?

0:00Hi, good morning, everyone. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to Office Hours Wednesday Q&A. This is your highly technical production Q&A extravaganza. We've got an awesome panel with a ton of wisdom assembled here to help you in whatever questions you may have. So, Alexander, let's dive right in. First question this morning is coming in from Jeff Cohen in Miami Beach, Florida. What do you think about the new Audacity 4?

0:25What do you think, Alexander? Well, I just installed it about 30 seconds ago. So I will tell you based on my own. I know, right? Look, you know, it's a free tool and it's been free since as long as I can remember. And I think any tool that is made available to the public that is maintained by a large group of people, I think, is a good thing.

0:48It serves a certain segment of the market. people that don't want complicated digital audio workstations. They're not looking for those kinds of tools. Maybe they just want to record something quickly, a piece of dialogue, be able to make some basic edits and get it out of there and upload it. And that's really how I see Audacity. It's not a replacement for Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Ableton, that kind of thing.

1:14It'll never be that kind of tool, you know, unless they wanted it to be. but it looks like they want to keep it as simple as possible. Now, this new version, I've never been a fan of the user interface. I thought it was always as ugly a sin as someone who came. Now, I used to be on Windows. All right, so I know what a lot of Windows apps and UIs have looked like.

1:33I've been using them since I was a kid all the way back to DOS. And I've always been a fan of design. And I remember when I switched to macOS, the design of apps on average, I felt looked a lot better than Windows apps. And when I look at Audacity, to me, it was always the worst of just lazy design. It just didn't happen.

1:55It was designed by committee with just a bunch of stock icons. And it never, as Windows evolved, even as Microsoft's design team evolved with their own design language, it never took advantage. Even if you installed anything previous to 4.0, which just came out this week, if you design, if you install 3.0 on, say, a Windows 11 machine, it doesn't look at home.

2:16It doesn't have the native Windows 11 language at all. But this new version, which I've installed, which now which has dark mode support, it is a complete redesign of the interface. And I have to say, while it's not I wouldn't call it beautiful. It is pretty decent to look at. And it looks significantly better right down to the icons. Everything got a complete overhaul.

2:42apparently there are many other aspects of the app that have been updated as well the spectral editor there's probably lots of plugins that have been updated so the interface got an update you can revert back to what they call call a classic user interface if you want but this new version I have to say does look quite a bit better so I haven't actually used it I'm not its target customer but

3:09But I think if you are looking for a free app to just record some audio or even just do some basic editing that, you know, based on a file that somebody gave you, normalize the audio and export it out for a podcast or something like that, it's probably a pretty decent tool for those types of people. And kudos to, first of all, any major feature release on an open source product that is maintained by a large number of people.

3:39To get any major release up is an achievement. To get a design overhaul, I think, is even more so because everyone that uses it is very opinionated. There's a reason that it kind of hung out in the UI space that it was for a long time. Jeff? Well, and that's one of the points really is I think the main reason it did is because