The Story Behind Audacity

Audacity is the world’s most widely used audio editing & recording software. It is free and open source software (FOSS) and maintained by an amazing community. In this video, I’m announcing my own involvement in the project, which I’m very excited about. For those worried about MuseScore (an open source notation & music app that I also lead): don’t be. I’m not going anywhere!

Please consider supporting me on Patreon

Twitter

Discord

---

Subtitles by Pentameron

---

---

Audacity Links

Homepage

Forum

Social Media

---

Other Links

About Logo

Roger Dannenberg’s Work

Waterfall Spectrogram

Joe Essay: Review of Paul Licameli’s De-clicker Plugin

Data Bending example by Max Liberatori

More on Data Bending

Use of Audacity in various disciplines

[scottonanski]

Having a horrible logo is the main staple of any open source project. It's like having street cred.

[Wrswest]

2030: Tentacrul is literally just the entire audio software industry by himself.

[hugoboyce]

About unusual uses: I was an intern for a while for a major aircraft engine manufacturer. In one of the maintenance manuals, one of the procedures to diagnose a faulty bearing or gearbox (I can't remember) is literally to record the engine's noise using Audacity, and to look for patterns in the spectrogram view.

[kadenculp]

This madman really went from making random youtube videos about music, to being a figurehead of the FOSS community. Damn

[adrianfernandez]

The “global media empire” joke from the previous video really wasn’t a joke

[luisfernandotapia]

The original developers are a bunch of lovely boomers. Thank you for everything guys. Audacity is an amazing contribution to humanity.

[dangerouscolors]

audacity and musescore were the first 2 infinity stones. now thantacrul needs the rest

[Goodmanperson]

First, Musecore
Now, it's Audacity
No piece of free and open source music software is safe from this man.

[Beak-man]

Unusual use case: Audacity supports esoteric audio file formats used in old, pre-smarthphone-era cellphones (e.g. for ringtones) and other telephone systems (like voice-over menus in PBXs). That's how I began using Audacity.

[spacefacts]

It didn't click in my head for a while that he's using a Zoom background of the ISS; I just automatically accepted he lived there

[wiesorix]

So Audacity realised it was janky and realised Tantacrul would tear it down in some future design video, so they hired him to prevent that? That's what I call planning ahead...

[endingsky]

If I got a dollar for every time tantacrul took over a Open source project, I had two dollars. Which isn't much but it's weird that it happened twice.

[commodore]

All this time I though Audacity was made by literally no one and just manifested itself on the internet and everyone kinda just went along with it

[somedumbhoe]

See guys, this is why you always start out doing what you love. Tantacrul went from “That guy who criticized musescore” to “Hey, I’m head of Musescore’s design team” to “Hey, now i’m in charge of Audacity” and he can really only go up from here

[まくぽっち]

As a main Chinese translator for Audacity during 2017 ~ 2020, I’m really happy to see some main community members who I have worked with share their stories and thoughts in an interview!

[daviddotorg]

2024: "I am now in charge of all music. I own all of it. It's all mine"

[blacksaltscotland]

I had an audible "wtf" when I saw this notification.

[chompers]

I used to audacity to clean up the answering machine message that my neighbors son left before he was murdered.
It's was a simple love you mum, see you tonight.

I made a copy from the tape and because audacity is free i was willing to give it a try even with having no knowledge of audio engineering.
I asked on a few forums and because audacity is free so many people had some experience with it.

Went the message was originally left on the answer machine it would have taken a professional to improve it as much as I did.
Thanks to the team for helping a mother hear the voice of her murdered son nearly 20 years later.

[GreatFlamingEyebrows_]

This man started with a hilarious angry rant about Sibelius and ended up in charge of audacity

[HappyNBoy]

Tantacruel is just going to slowly take over all creative endeavors... One day it'll all be Disney and Tantacruel.