 On Linux, if you want to record audio, the best way to do that has almost always been Audacity. For the most part, there are several other ways of doing it obviously, but if you want to use a graphical audio interface of some kind, Audacity is probably the best choice and has been for many, many years. It's been around for a very long time. This past year has not been so great for the Audacity project. They got bought by some corporation. That corporation bungled their purchase and made a ton of people mad. It was a gigantic fiasco in the truest sense of the word. So after that all happened, several people forked Audacity in order to keep the bad things that that company was going to do with Audacity from happening. And one of those projects was Audacity. Now around that time, there were several different forks that were promising the moon, really. They were saying, oh, we're going to take Audacity and make it good again and prevent bad things from happening to it. For the most part, those promises have been completely not fulfilled. Any of the forks that I'm aware of are basically just branches of Audacity itself from prior to when the corporation behind Audacity put in telemetry. That's basically what all the forks are. And the only thing that varies between the forks seems to be the level of activity that they receive in terms of at least some minor updates. So a couple of weeks ago, Distritube did a video on a couple of these forks and honestly I hadn't followed the forks at all to tell that point. I was just happily using Audacity version two point something. I was still using the one prior to when they changed the file format. And I was happy with it, like as happy as you can be with a application that looks like it was developed in the 1990s, but it worked well and did everything I needed to do. And I was happy with it. Once DT did his video, I was like, you know what, I'm going to give one of these forks to try. Based on his video, I chose to use Audacity and I've been using it now for almost two weeks. I think I downloaded the exact day he did his video a week, two weeks. It doesn't matter. The point is I've been using it now for a while and I have some thoughts. So let's first let's go ahead and take a look at Audacity. This is what it looks like. Now, obviously I'm not going to be doing much in this while I'm recording because I'm actually recording my audio through this right now. I always record my audio separately. That way I can go through and get the best quality audio I possibly can, even though mostly I fail at that because despite doing this, I still suck at editing audio. But you know the funny thing is this is completely off topic. I watched one of my videos from like six months ago. I was using the exact same mic. The audio does sound better. I have learned some things. So that's good news, totally off the point. But the thing is this is Audacity. If you don't notice any differences between this and Audacity, I wouldn't blame you because there's not a lot of differences here. The only glaring difference is that this comes with the dark theme out of the box. And that's good. It looks better in a dark theme. It definitely does. They have done something to make a dark theme actually look good because you've always been able to do a dark theme in Audacity. You can either use their built-in dark theme, which wasn't very good, or you could use a custom like CSS file. I don't think it was CSS, but something of that vein to import your own theme. Those were good, but they were also kind of hacky. It was supported, but some of the themes were not all completed. Some of them hadn't been updated in ages and just kind of broke things. The point is that you could use those themes, but it was kind of your mileage may vary kind of thing. So the fact that this comes with a good dark theme is good. Outside of that, and a few things in the settings, and the lack of telemetry, at least supposedly the lack of telemetry. This is just Audacity. And that's the thing I want to talk about really today. So before I do that, let me just show you some of the things that I think have changed. Now, there's not like a dedicated list of things that they've changed, at least that I could find. Actually, I can't even enter the preferences while I'm recording. So that's going to be a complete fail. But they have gone through and added this theme here that you so you can change back and forth between this theme and the regular Audacity thing. I'm not sure whether or not the light one has actually changed because I never actually tried the light one because light themes shouldn't exist at all. Other than that, I didn't notice any significant changes. So the question is, before I get into the whole criticizing of this project thing, and I'm going to I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But the thing I want to make clear is that developing an application like this, especially when you're forking it from someone else and you don't know all the code is hard, like I'm aware that it's hard, or at least I'm somewhat, you know, I somewhat know that it's hard. I'm not a developer. So criticizing developers for not being able to develop something better for that is is like the height of arrogance. So I don't want to be that kind of guy, but I'm going to go do it do it anyways. But the point is I understand that creating something like this and then or taking something that's then making it better is hard. So we'll get that out of the way. But I wonder what the point was because the thing was with Audacity is that it works really well. It does. It's one of those apps that it doesn't look pretty, but it functions fantastically. It always has. And there's a reason why everyone who doesn't subscribe to 80 or $90 a month for Adobe Audition. That's why everyone basically uses Audacity. It's a very large project. And there's a reason why that company that bought Audacity wanted to buy them is because it's very, very popular. The thing is, is when you fork something and then manage to garner some following behind that fork, it gives you at least a little bit of a responsibility to maintain it. And I'm not convinced that this fork or any of the forks, I'm not just picking on Audacity, I'm really do anything to add to Audacity itself. Like, sure, all they've taken the security concerns away from what you would expect if you used Audacity itself. But outside of that, other than a dark theme, it doesn't seem like they've done all that much. And maybe I'm just expecting things to happen too quickly. Maybe these things were never going to happen. Maybe there was going to be no improvements whatsoever, simply because too hard. So they don't. I mean, it's probably just one person, really. They started it. I'm sure there's other contributors now, but there's just going to be a small team if there is more than one person. So maybe it's too difficult. That's a reasonable explanation. Also, maybe they don't think that it needs to be changed at all. You know, maybe the dark theme was the only thing that they thought they could add to add value. And they decided just to leave Audacity basically the way it is and just, you know, rebrand it and pull out the telemetry. Again, that's fine. I've enjoyed my time with Audacity, but my time with Audacity has been very similar to what my time with Audacity was. They are the same. There's no differences other than the, you know, the coat of paint. So I guess my point is so I guess if you were to ask the question, should you switch to Audacity from Audacity? The answer to that question would be, do you care to use the most recent version of the software? If so, you should use Audacity simply because a lot of distros aren't actually packaging Audacity for the new versions. Like, I know at least ARCO and ART seem to be in the two still in the version twos and, you know, that's a good decision, but it means you're not getting any updates whatsoever. It seems at least that by using Audacity, Audacity, you're getting somewhat more of a recent version, which is a good thing because maybe there'll be new features, you get a new theme or whatever. Security fixes, bug fixes, whatever, those will come through in the more recent versions that you won't get if your distribution is actually holding things back. So should you switch? Maybe. If you're, the thing is, don't switch because you're expecting something grand and new. You're not going to get it. You're going to be disappointed. It's just Audacity with a fresh name. The one thing I was really hoping that they'd change, like, I understand the UI thing is something that needs to be refreshed. And hopefully the mainline branch will have a new UI soon. That was always the hope when we still had hope that the company behind Audacity would do good things, is that they'd do a UI refresh. But one of the things I was hoping that Audacity would do was at least improve the startup speed. Because Audacity and Audacity takes just a ton of time to start. Sometimes upwards of 30 seconds. And that's just not a good experience. I mean, in the grand scheme, things not a big deal. But again, it's one of those things where you just notice it. So don't switch to Audacity. I'm simply because you're expecting something new. That's just not going to happen. It's just Audacity. So that's it for this video, a little bit of a Ramboley video. But I wanted to cover this because I think a lot of people when these forks happened were, I know I was like this, we're kind of excited because it kind of felt like it was going to rejuvenate Audacity. Just a little bit more and more people, it seemed like we're getting interested in Audacity simply because of the controversy surrounding it. And a lot of those people who happen to be developers may have gone through and try to support one of the forks that, you know, kind of popped up afterwards. That doesn't seem to be the case. The interest in this has really died down. The one thing I'm really worried about is that the people who support Audacity, you know, the 10 or 12 people who are doing the development work on it, just lose interest because, I mean, basically all they seem to be doing is taking whatever new version of Audacity is released and pulling out the telemetry and they're releasing this. That seems to be what they're doing. And eventually, are they going to want to do that anymore? I don't know. So are we going to come to a point where you're using Audacity, but it's no longer updated ever again because it's been abandoned. That's also possible. I think that's possible for a lot of these forks because they just either don't have the resources or interest in maintaining it. So it's a conundrum for sure. So that is it for this video. If you want to get in contact, you can leave a comment in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Sid, a Devon Chris, East Coast Webgent, who's fun to Patrick, a Primus, Marcus, Megalyn, Jackson, Toul, Steve, a Mitchell, Artisan and Amityus, carbon-dated Merrick, Camp Joshua Lee, J-Dog, the Beasties, Rock, Peter, and Carousel. Carousel. Thanks, everybody, for watching. I'll see you next time.