Calls to Help Creating an Audacity Fork

July 5, 2021

Written by

M.Hanny Sabbagh

Ever since the last controversy about Audacity, people have been calling to fork the program under a new umbrella so that the community can finally end this discussion and move forward. The frustration is huge because Audacity has been an excellent audio editor since the 2000s, and it is sad to see it taken by corporate interest.

However, forking a software like Audacity is no easy task.

A fellow developer, “Cookie Engineer” took the effort of creating an initial fork of Audacity which is stripped of all tracking code and telemetry functionality. However, he and the other friends need help in:

Choosing an official name for the project, because Audacity is a registered trademark for MuseGroup, and hence, it can not be used as a name for the new project. “Courage”, “AudioBakery” and “Temerity” are all suggested possible names.
Defining the scope for the fork. There are some decisions that need to be taken on how to go forward: Should upstream features be merged back in the new fork or should the fork completely diverge from it? Should the fork’s graphical user interface be re-written in Qt toolkit, GTK3 or kept as it is in the old wxWidgets?
Also, our fellow developer Cookie Engineer says that he can not completely maintain the fork by his own, and suggests creating an organization body on GitHub to manage the process. More developers are going to be needed to maintain the fork.
Building Windows versions. As the main developer announced that he can not provide the Windows binaries by himself, someone will need to come forward in order to build the fork for Windows operating system. Some folks mentioned that GitHub actions could be used to automate the task, but nothing is settled yet.

All of these are important discussions that are taking place right now as we speak in order to decide the future of the fork. One can expect that once things are defined and settled, various Linux distributions could be pick the fork up and drop the official old Audacity package from its official repositories.

Which is why all of this is very important.

If you are an Audacity user or a software developer interested in this topic, than you are more than welcome to join the discussions and decide the future of the Audacity fork. Everyone can participate in help in different things, even if you are not a software developer and just an old Audacity user.

More details about the fork can be found in its GitHub page.

Written by:

M.Hanny Sabbagh

With a B.Sc and M.Sc in Computer Science & Engineering, Hanny brings more than a decade of experience with Linux and open-source software. He has developed Linux distributions, desktop programs, web applications and much more. All of which attracted tens of thousands of users over many years. He additionally maintains other open-source related platforms to promote it in his local communities. Hanny is the founder of FOSS Post.

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Comments

4 responses

SeniorMars

July 6, 2021

It’s really sad to this happening to a project that was (in my definition) one of the best examples of an open source product that could many (even non linux nerds) used. I’ve read the thread about cookie engineer’s actions to take a stance against trolls. Although, I see why they(?) had to do it, I am hopeful that this is only due to the initial excitement the project has. Given the stakes for an audio program of this caliber, if they ever open donations for this new team to be supported, I would like to donate.

Reply
AkA

July 6, 2021

Please take a look at this fork as well. It’s just as far, if not farther along in terms of remove the telemetry and other spyware currently present in Audacity.
https://github.com/Sneeds-Feed-and-Seed/sneedacity

Reply
Benjamin R.

July 6, 2021

It appears that this so-called fork of audacity has bogged itself down with being more bothered with a few so-called trolls. Another fork, Sneedacity, seems to be fully up and running. They have already gotten much of the work done on their repo to removing references to audacity. This “cookie engineer” might also not be trustworthy, seeing as their history is one of breaking security to acquire personal information. I don’t know if a maintainer like that is the best to lead a project that is about removing boundless data collection.

Reply
Jamie

July 6, 2021

There’s this fork that already has a name, logo and a list of goals it wants to achieve. I think more attention and effort should be focused there, seeing as how it already has stuff done and its first release.

https://github.com/SartoxOnlyGNU/audacium

Reply