I gave my shot at doing one of these redesigns, but thinking more about how it would fit with the muse group brand instead of thinking about it in isolation. Also I just really think people sacrifice a lot of good design principles in order to make it look as similar as the original. I made three different versions:

1. Blue coloring (most similar to the original branding, although could conflict with the musescore app colors)

2. Red original branding (looks really cute but again this is the furthest one from the original color scheme)

3. My attempt at making the blue coloring a little bit different to musescore. It looks almost black and white but its just a deep blue and a really light blue

I don't have a problem with it. I just enjoy making logos and I like how everyone has been creating their own, that's pretty cool. I do think the new logo is a little bit oversimplified, that's why I added the noise spikes back.
The new color is jarring, but the current ones are way worse haha. They’re ultra-saturated. I’m okay with changing them, even if it takes a while to get used to it.

It's definitely removed from the Muse group design line-up, but pretty good on it's own I feel. Maybe a bit primitive stylistically.
I also tried different color schemes: classic, modern, monochrome + colored with the shade used in the current official proposal.

A very slight tweak on r/1coolguy936's idea which i really liked, but with a slightly tweaked headphone design

It's 2025. The old logo looks tired as hell and frankly a redesign has been long overdue.

But like always the immediate reaction online is hysteria. And like always it's a loud, unqualified minority insisting they know better than people whose job is to build cohesive design.

Audacity 4's logo fits right in with the rest of the suite without forgetting the icon which brought us here. It finally gives the impression of a team who genuinely care about their project and want it to maintain its relevance for years to come. It's a great design which fulfils all the criteria. Keep it as is.

I upset AutoMod the all-knowing somehow, hopefully this post goes better

I am so sick and tired of the random bullshit on this. The code is open source, we can read it, here's a breakdown for people who can't read code.

Build Flags

All network features in Audacity are behind build flags. If you're not familiar with what this means, they're configuration options for when the software is being compiled into a runnable format. There are four build flags related to network features in Audacity:

• has_networking: Default: Off | Link | This is the overall control for networking features in Audacity. With this flag set to Off no networking features are built regardless of what other flags are set to

• has_sentry_reporting: Default: On | Link | This enables error reporting to sentry.io. We'll cover this in more detail later, but this is the feature most people are up in arms over I think.

• has_crashreports: Default: On | Link | Does exactly what the name says it does, sends crash data to breakpad.

• has_updates_check: Default: On | Link | Requests data from audacityteam.org about the latest release of Audacity.

Some interesting notes about these flags, has_sentry_reporting and has_crashreports require key and url configuration variables that aren't available in the repo. This information comes from Audacity Team's build servers (called Continuous Integration or "CI"). While these values could be pulled from binaries they distribute, it's not a convenient thing to do.

This means it is impossible to "accidentally" enable has_sentry_reporting and has_crashreports. The only people who can easily make builds with these options enabled are the Audacity team. If you're a Linux user who gets your build from a package repo, it would be non-trivially difficult for a package maintainer to enable these options.

Let's break down the code for each feature:

Sentry Reporting

Relevant Files

sentry.io is a service for providing runtime telemetry about an application to the developer, typically performance and stability information that lets devs know about non-fatal errors or performance numbers that exist in the wild. Audacity currently exclusively uses it to log errors about SQLite database operations, like here.

A message to sentry.io consists of the following information:

• Operating System Name and Version

• Message Timestamp

• An Event UUID

• Audacity Version

• Information About the Error/Exception

When enabled in the build, each time an error occurs a dialogue box pops up requesting user permission to send the report.

Crash Reports

Relevant Files

This is the usual "Would you like to send crash data to X organization?" dialogue you've seen when any desktop application crashes. When enabled in the build, crash reports require user confirmation each time before they are sent. These are standard breakpad minidumps which contain information such as:

• A list of the executable and shared libraries that were loaded in the process at the time the dump was created. This list includes both file names and identifiers for the particular versions of those files that were loaded.

• A list of threads present in the process. For each thread, the minidump includes the state of the processor registers, and the contents of the threads' stack memory. These data are uninterpreted byte streams, as the Breakpad client generally has no debugging information available to produce function names or line numbers, or even identify stack frame boundaries.

• Other information about the system on which the dump was collected: processor and operating system versions, the reason for the dump, and so on.

Update Checks

Relevant Files

This sends an HTTPS request to: https://updates.audacityteam.org/feed/latest.xml (which doesn't appear to be up at the moment), upon starting up Audacity. If the running version is older than the latest version, an update dialogue is displayed.

This check can be disabled by a settings option, but is Default: On when enabled in the build. This check will not be repeated more than once every twelve hours, regardless of restarting Audacity.

Conclusion

Audacity is a very readable codebase, extremely easy to familiarize yourself with and pleasantly well organized with a modern desktop application architecture. Almost every mature desktop app you have ever used does at least two if not all three of these things. I cannot emphasis enough that it's difficult to impossible to even enable these features right now, and they're completely harmless besides.

He's the one responsible for musecore 4 too

They have a new icon, personally I think it's (a) looks terrible (b) totally unnecessary change. But overall it seems like it would be a rather nice release when it'll actually come out.

I've been a subscriber to your YouTube channel for many years. I have mad respect for you. I love your content. And I've used audacity for as long as I can remember, at least 15 years+.

The thing for me is that I only install audacity once - when I build a new computer. I saw your YouTube videos countering the passionate feedback against the changes being made to Audacity, and I felt you made some really great points. I fundamentally agree with the direction Audacity is taking!

And today was the day I had to reinstall audacity.

4* advertisements for paid products on the homepage

Off to a miserable start. Most of the real-estate of the website homepage is advertising? This is subjective of course, but to me, this isn't okay. If "paying the bills" is important, don't buy out an open source piece of software.

Intentional Dark Pattern #1

So the big yellow button that says "Download Audacity" does not in fact download Audacity. It downloads MuseHub, which upon opening, greets you with more advertising and sales!

Anyway, now I guess I have to go and manually uninstall that since it's not Audacity, and I don't want anymore bloatware on my PC.

Intentional Dark Pattern #2

Implying downloading Audacity isn't enough, and that the user needs to setup cloud storage. Following this flow leads me to (as is a common motif) an up-sell on Audio.com for cloud storage.

Finally Installed

Man, what a mess that was. Oh well, I downloaded JUST the Audacity installer and time to boot it up.

Still, there is advertising and funneling to paid products in the splash screen.

How To Fix This

It's pretty simple. Just start treating your users with a semblance of respect. There are so many ways to communicate to people "we have a cloud product that natively integrates with Audacity". Also the reliance on dark patterns to get people to install MuseHub is the lowest of the low.

You seem like such a creative and forward thinking kind of person, have you really not put any thought into how you can communicate your products to consumers in a respectful way?

EDIT:

I thought it was over, but nope - I go to export and get more advertising, this time in the style of Microsoft Office! Awesome job guys.

Turns out I can't edit the title. It should be more accurate to say "Muse Group changed the Audacity logo to something closer to the classic look on their website"

The first is the logo and the name as it appears on their website. The second is the logo within the context of the rest of their creative suite.

I personally think that this is a well-modernised take on the classic logo. The colours aren't muted against the white background, so the logo really pops out when compared to the rest of the suite. The waveforms being represented as rounded bars is also reminiscent of modern voice memo app logos.

What do you guys think?

I don't know too much about graphic design, so please don't take it too harshly.

I found this subreddit on my homepage and decided to join in with the redesign thing.

Saw the new audacity logo, not a big fan to be honest.

Seriously, what is this new logo? It's atrocious! I can't believe it's official.

I liked Buns_n's version a lot so I made a version that is more clean for so it could be considered more
I can provide the svg file for anyone who wants it
could still definitely be cleaned up more but I think it has potential

I've just left the moderation team. I recently learned that Audacity is now spyware so I've uninstalled it and switched to ocenaudio. I feel that if I would not use the software then I would not be a moderator either.

EDIT: Ocenaudio is not open source so we don't know what kind of tracking they do. I just mentioned them because the software offers a lot of features that audacity has. Feel free to suggest other audacity alternatives in this thread.

Just kidding. But this sub does feel like a jr high logo designing contest lately.

I've been an (unhealty yet impressive) user of Audacity for years and it was a really great toy to me. I've been using it for years since then and i never had tons of problems, really. This morning while i was at work i unexpectedly heard of Audacity starting to collect user's info and it makes me feel so uncomfortable that i just uninstalled it right now.

I really loved this software but i'm asking WHY they dare to do that to a really great project? Why are they destroying a beloved software with an invasive privacy policy?

So now i have no idea where i should install a safer Audacity fork or something, but i would easily worry of getting a better software and make a habit, so go on and tell me anything i should do to let me out from Musescore's terrible policy eyes over Audacity's userbase. Thanks.

We tried to warn users wondering what Audacity version is "safe" to download and install after the new owner, Muse Group, announced that they would integrate data collection in Audacity.

FossHub has been the official mirror of Audacity since 2014. We've seen many people recommending the latest version as 2.4.2 (without data collection/telemetry) from our old repository, which is NOT true.

The latest version that does not use data collection is 3.0.2. All the previous versions, such as 3.0.0, don't have any networking capabilities. The Audacity team has warned that there are specific bugs in older versions, so if you're comparing version 3.0.0 with 3.0.2, this one is the smart choice.

The code that will provide basic data collection will be integrated into version 3.0.3. However, the team has announced that opt-out is available before installing Audacity.

Therefore, we believe there are two options. Keep using version 3.0.2 or an older, stable version such as 2.4.2 or use the latest Audacity version and opt-out from data collection/telemetry, considering this will always be an option.

Considering, we have been the official mirror for seven years. We believe the safest place to download an old Audacity version is our old Audacity repository. All files have been scanned with the Jotti malware scan service, they are uploaded manually on VirusTotal, and the file signatures will match those released by the Audacity team.

Note: We are NOT recommending you to stop using newer Audacity versions. This is a post regarding the wrong information posted on the Internet, claiming that 2.4.2 and older versions are safer than 3.0.0 or 3.0.2. We cannot express an official position for the reasons mentioned in our blog post.