A new future for Audacity
Meet Soundscaper, a non-profit web-based reimplementation of Audacity 4.
Audacity has been a staple of the free and open source world for over a quarter of a century. It’s exactly the sort of app the world needs more of, a box of useful tools that can be used for every possible and impossible audio task, without any annoying upsells, ads, or subscription services. Or rather: it was.
Following the acquisition by a for-profit company in 2021, Audacity has seen some incredible developments: A shift towards non-destructive editing, towards features relevant to music production, and with 4.0, an entirely new UI system. But it also has seen exactly the sort of thing the world doesn’t need more of: Ads on the website, ads on the welcome screen, ads in the main UI, ads when you try to save or export, both for their cloud subscription service and unfree third party plugins.
It is easy to extrapolate Audacity’s future from here and imagine a future where corporate forces attempt to squeeze more and more “value” out of Audacity by continuously enshittifying it. It’s much harder to imagine a future where the corporate overlords would be content with the money Audacity brings in right now, or indeed reduce the amount of ads it has – the incentive structure in a for-profit company ultimately is pointing in a different direction.
It is for this reason that we, a group of former Audacity team members and users, have been working on an alternative: Soundscaper. Like Audacity, Soundscaper is an easy-to-use audio editor, with the same look and feel as can be found in Audacity 4.
Unlike Audacity, it is web-based and thus runs on virtually any platform, including Windows, Linux, BSD, Android, MacOS, iOS and iPadOS. Also unlike Audacity 4.0, it carries virtually all features Audacity 3 had and many more, like the ability to record desktop audio and a microphone at the same time, send buses or video tracks.
Go to soundscaper.org to try it out, or check out the latest releases for the desktop version.
Soundscaper is being built by Mindscaper, a non-profit association based in Denmark. We’re also currently working on a video editor and may work on more creative software in the future. If you’d like to help us, go to mindscaper.org/join.