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.

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