 Anyone that does any kind of audio content creation or video content creation, one of the most important pieces of software you use is the audio editor. And for me, for many years, the audio editor I used was Audacity. Audacity is cross-platform, it's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it's free and open source software, or at least it was. Until about seven or eight months ago, Audacity was purchased by a company called Muse Group. Audacity companies started injecting telemetry into the source code and adding weird terms of service, like now they have an age restriction on who can actually use the software, and weird things like that that strictly go against the ideals of free and open source software. So I really don't consider Audacity to be free and open source software anymore, and many people within the free and open source community have kind of abandoned Audacity. If you're running Audacity on Linux, chances are your Linux distribution doesn't ship a new version of Audacity. They're shipping an old version before the Muse Group takeover and before the injection of all that telemetry and nastiness. And because Audacity has essentially been a dead project for several months now, we need to start moving away from the old versions of Audacity that of course are not getting updates because they're old versions, we need to start exploring other options. And what I've done is here in the last couple of days, I've been playing around with two very popular forks of Audacity. Those forks are called Tenacity and Audacem. Both of them are available in the Arch user repository, the AUR. So let's talk about why I'm taking a look at these particular two forks of Audacity today, because there's actually probably dozens of forks of Audacity at this point, because as soon as Audacity went down the road that it was going, you know, a whole bunch of people forked the project. But the problem is most of those people, they forked the project before the telemetry was added, but they never did anything else with it. So they're essentially forks that didn't go anywhere or not going anywhere, at least with Tenacity and Audacem. I see that they have some development, you know, somebody's actually working on these things. So if I go to GitHub and look for the Tenacity project, I can see that within the last 18 days, there was at least one commit in the last 18 days. I see some recent activity, you know, two months ago, several things going on, and you see the number of contributors, 200 contributors. And if for more information, a good look is the insights, because insights tells me that there's there's been zero pull requests on the last week. But if I go back a month, there's been one pull request and really commits tells us all we need to know as far as the activity. So there was a lot of activity back in the summer after Audacity was purchased by Muse Group. And, you know, there was a lot of development on Tenacity. And then it kind of dried up, right? Really not much has gone on here in the last two or three months. So that does give me a little pause that there's really no recent activity here. Let's go ahead and take a look at the Audacem GitHub while we're at it. Audacem, I see that there's been some activity with it here in the last 12, 10 days. So they're seeing some recent commits contributors. There's 144 contributors. And if I go into insights, which will really give me more information here, I can see there's been two pull requests in the last week. So that's pretty good. I mean, there's some activity going on here in the last week. And in the last month, they've got four pull requests. If I go to the number of commits, you can see back in the summer when the Audacity stuff went down, again, it was very active. And then it kind of dried up a little bit. But they've seen a few commits every couple of weeks. And here in the last month or so, they've actually seen a resurgence in activity. You can see 12 commits here about three weeks ago. Seven commits just in the last week. So I've already got both tenacity and Audacem installed. So let me go ahead and show you guys tenacity. So what I'll do is I'll run both of these programs and do some simple audio editing just to see if it's stable, see if it's the kind of workflow that I had inside Audacity. And tenacity does take a few seconds to launch. That's also going to be the same issue with Audacem. It's going to take a few seconds to launch as well because Mainline Audacity takes a few seconds to launch. It's just slow to launch. But don't worry, it's just a few seconds. And then once the programs actually load, they work just fine. So we've got a dark theme here. Now, if you prefer, you could actually go in preferences. And when preferences loads, you have interface, theme, dark. If you wanted to, you could go to a light. And the light theme actually looks pretty good. I don't mind the light theme other than, you know, it's a light theme, right? It's kind of bright. And these days I prefer dark themes just for my eyes. So let's go ahead and work on a piece of audio. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab the very first clip that I recorded for this video and import it. Then off screen, this window popped up, wanting to know which stream of audio to import because that particular audio clip had two streams to it. And then let me go ahead and get my headphones on because if I don't plug in some headphones, if I just listen to this on speakers, right, the speakers are going to bleed into the microphone and we're going to get some weird feedback on the video. So I'm going to show you some of the most common things that I do with audio clips when I'm editing them or cleaning them up. So one of the most common uses for audacity or for these forks like tenacity in this case is noise reduction. This waveform, you can see where I start speaking. But say before I start speaking, there's a lot of noise. If I'm outside, maybe there's a lot of wind noise or running water from a stream that's close by or indoors, air conditioning, fans, refrigerators, you know, electric hums, things like that. So you want to select a section of strictly noise and then go to effect and then go to noise reduction and then get noise profile. And what this does is it tells audacity or tenacity in this case. Hey, that is the noise profile, all that crud there. So then when I select the entire clip by just clicking off to the side here, I go to effect and go to noise reduction again and click OK. Everywhere it finds that kind of noise profile, it will eliminate it, right? It just removes it from that audio track. And then let me go ahead and play that back. Anyone that does any kind of audio content creation. OK, man, it plays back just fine. I'm assuming the noise reduction worked just fine. Now, that particular audio clip doesn't have any noise because that was done here, of course, inside my studio here. And a lot of noise is taken out in my recordings from the hardware from the audio server wreck behind me as well. But that was just an example of some common task that most people do inside audacity is the noise reduction. Some other things I commonly would do is if I didn't already have compression done with hardware, I would add compression with audacity. So I would set a ratio of about a three to one or four to one ratio. Hit OK. And now we have a compressed track. Now let me play that back, see how that sounds. Anyone that does any kind of audio content creation. Now, the compression sounds just fine. So that's working OK. Now, one thing with the compression is it did raise the volume a little bit, and it's going to be peaking in some places. So now what I'm going to do is select the whole track and then go to normalize and tell it any time that finds a peak, reduce it by one decibel, I think will be enough. And now let's go ahead and play that back. Anyone that does any kind of audio content creation or yeah, that sounds very good. I'm actually pretty happy with that. Now, one thing you would do if you were doing an audio podcast, say I'm doing an audio podcast and I have a partner and our mic levels are different, you know, when we go back and listen to it in editing and post, I notice my mic is really loud and my partner's mic is really soft. Well, say this is me talking, you know, and then after that, he's talking. Well, what I'll do is I need to lower my volume. So now that I've selected me speaking, I would go into amplify and instead of amplifying it, I'm actually just going to decrease it by, let's say, two decibels. And now let's play back that section. Any kind of audio content. Yeah, and that's definitely quieted a little bit where you use is the and you can see I'm louder in the next section. So that worked just fine. Another common thing I do is play with the graphic EQ. So, for example, maybe I want to boost, you know, some of the low end like 125 Hertz and maybe I want to, I don't know, drop some of the mids here. Maybe I have a problem with sibilants or something and I want to drop some of the mid range. Now, this is probably going to sound really bad. Me playing with those EQ levels because I do all my EQ on hardware. So I really didn't need to do that. But again, just an example to see if it works. Anyone that does any kind of audio content creation or video content creation. Yeah, and I can tell, especially on my headphones that the base was boosted from raising that 125 Hertz level. It's really boomy kind of muddy. It doesn't sound good and it's really thin at the top as well. That's not great for the EQ. But again, this is just an example of some other things, some fun things. You know, we could add some reverb. Now, reverb is typically what you'd want to do with instrumental trash. You normally don't want this on voice, but anyone that does any kind of audio content creation. Yeah, so very cool. So tenacity seems to work. Everything that I pretty much would do in audacity seems to work just fine in tenacity as well. So I'd have no problem using that. Now, let's try the same things. Once again, audacity is going to take a few seconds to launch. And then once it launches, it's got a very nice dark theme as well. So let me go ahead and import that same track from before. And once again, it's going to ask me about the audio stream. So I want stream one from that track. And then we'll do the same thing. So let's assume that this is noise here at the beginning. Let's do a noise reduction. So affect noise reduction, get noise profile. And then select the whole track, go to affect noise reduction and just click OK. And it should have reduced all the noise. Let's go ahead and start it playing as any kind of audio. OK, so that seems like that worked just fine. And then let's also try the compressor. So select the whole track. Let's do a compression, do a three to one compression is fine. And once again, it's going to raise the volume. But let's see how it sounds. Anyone that does any kind of audio content. Yeah, and that actually sounds really good with the compression. But let's normalize it just to get rid of some of the peaking. And once again, anyone that does any kind of audio content create some of the other things that I took a look at in tenacity. We also took a look at the amplify. So if I wanted to select a section and then decrease the volume, this front section here, select it and then go to amplify. And once again, I'll decrease it by two decibels. And play that section as any kind of audio content creation or and that worked out just fine. Then I'll select the whole track and let's try a I haven't tried the graphic EQ yet. Let's EQ it basically the same way we we did the last one. Let's just I know it's going to sound bad because we're doing the exact same thing. But anyone that does any kind of audio content creation or video content. Yeah, very boomy, very basic sounds really bad. Let's go ahead and make it just horrible by adding the reverb. Anyone that does any kind of audio content. All right. And that is audacium. So I would have no problem using either tenacity or audacium. I think both of them work just fine for me. The only thing that gives me pause with these two projects is the fact that it does seem like development has kind of slowed down with both projects here in recent months compared to what they were when the news of audacity first broke. Tenacity especially seems like it's not saying much development right now where audacium, at least in the last couple of weeks has seen several commits. So I'm probably going to keep audacium installed on my system. I'm going to go ahead and remove audacity because there's no reason to even have that thing on my system anymore. Audacity is essentially a dead project at this point, at least in terms of the free and open source community. We're not contributing to that thing anymore. Now that it's been, you know, really kind of veered away from the ideals of free and open source software. So I'm going to link to both tenacity and audacium in the show description for you guys that want to try it out. For those of you that are compiling it, the compilation times are not very long. It took me about five minutes to compile both tenacity and audacium. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of the show. Of course, I'm talking about Devon, Gabe, James, Mad, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Akami, Allen, Len, Extended, Jatuk, Commander, Anger, Kerr, Diokai, Devon, Dylan, Gregory, Aiko, Coxley, Lee, Max, Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arjun, Fedor, Polytech, Ray, Ray, Robert, Steven, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode, you just watched about tenacity and audacium. It wouldn't have been possible. The show has also brought you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I mean, what kind of corporate sponsor would want to sponsor me? Right? It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to support me, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. And I need your support because obviously I need more coffee.