At the beginning of the year I started list of applications that I was going to use this year and The 14th place belongs to the audio editor Tenacity. I remind you that my goal is to replace proprietary applications and services.
Although "mortality" in the world of open source applications is high, there are projects that come from the early years of Linux, either in their original form or as forks. Tenacity audio editor is a fork of Audacity, a program that has been with us since 1999.
Although it was born as an academic project, it was made public on the SourceForge download site in May 2000. Our story begins in 2021 when Muse Group, a company specialized in software for musicians.
Muse Group's purchase of Audacity allowed him to keep the Audacity trademarks (Including the name and logo) They also hired the core team of developers. Fortunately, as we will see in the next paragraph, the source code remained free.
In July 2021, the new owners changed the privacy policy including a clause that gave them the right to collect data that served as evidence in case of legal demands or requirements from the authorities. I assume they were trying to protect themselves from record labels that had launched attacks against software projects like the Kodi media center or the JDownloader download manager.
The data collected such as IP address and device characteristics could also be shared for advertising purposes.
The Tenacity Audio Editor
As I already said, Tenacity is a fork of Audacity that was born due to the concerns of the Audacity community about the new owners and the changes in the privacy policy that I mentioned above.
Because of this, a group of volunteers from the Audacity community decided to create a fork of the software called Tenacity. Tenacity sought to maintain the traditional functionalities of the project without giving up freedom or privacy. The following objectives were established:
- Maintain open source nature of the project avoiding proprietary benefits
- Preserve compatibility with existing Audacity plugins and projects.
- Commit to a more privacy-friendly approach, minimizing data collection as a way to ensure user privacy.
In reality, as often happens in the world of free and open source software, there were several forks and forks of forks. For example, some users unhappy because the name chosen in the vote on 4chan was not respected created their own.
Tenacity started with a lot of enthusiasm and It received a new construction system that avoided having to use the dependencies of the original program and a dynamic compressor that was originally going to be for Audacity. However, the project was stopped.
What saved the project was that the developer of another fork, Saucecity proposed merging them and took over as the lead developer. Over time Audacium also joined.
Tenacity Features
- Sound can be recorded from virtual and real devices.
- It integrates with the FFMPEG multimedia library allowing you to import and export with almost all audio formats.
- Works with the floating 32-bit audio format (This type of format provides a wider dynamic range, which makes it easier to capture very loud or low sounds, avoiding distortions or quality losses.
- Functionality can be increased by adding plugins.
- It allows you to automate tasks by creating scripts in some of the most popular programming languages
- You can work with multiple tracks.
- To improve accessibility, it can be used with a keyboard and screen reader.
- It has a tool for signal processing.
- Online manual included.
The program is in the repositories of the main Linux distributions or can be installed from Flathub with the command:
flatpak install flathub org.tenacityaudio.Tenacity
In any case, it is good to clarify that the version of Audacity available in the Linux repositories has telemetry disabled.