The Audacity of it

We chat with Martin Keary about the new features of Audacity, managing a community and the pitfalls of telemetry.

- Martin Keary

For over 20 years, Audacity has been the leading cross-platform, open-source audio editor, with that instantly recognisable orange and blue headphone logo. Like many open source projects, it was created out of the need to solve an unusual problem: co-founders professor Roger Dannenberg and Dominic Mazzoni’s requirement for an adept cross-platform audio visualisation tool to help with their Query by Humming research, among other audio oddities.

In 2021, Audacity was acquired by Muse Group and almost instantly ran into controversy over the introduction of telemetry and a new privacy policy. Since then, however, Muse Group has progressed Audacity’s development with much-requested real-time effects, a seemingly unstoppable progression towards being a full audio-production suite and even an updated icon. We talked to Martin Keary, product owner at Audacity, about introducing new features, new policies and a new interface, plus the dangers of skeuomorphism and Ubuntu Unity design.

LINUX FORMAT We DuckDuckGoed your name and discovered your YouTube channel, which has a fantastic video about the history and background of Audacity, in which you interview its original creators.

MARTIN KEARY That was fantastic for me. Being a YouTuber who is interested in music technology and stories about audio, it was great to talk to the founders. I saw the kind of passion they put into it and learned about some of the characters involved. I also discovered all kinds of things about the app itself and why it came to be the way it was.

LXF Are those original developers still fully engaged in the project?